


The Soul Mate Phenomenon (is ruining my life)

by Tozette



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Gen, Platonic Soulmates, soulmate au where you can write to your soulmate on your skin and it shows up on theirs, spoilers in the bookmarks
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-16
Updated: 2017-04-26
Packaged: 2018-10-05 23:47:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 25,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10320338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tozette/pseuds/Tozette
Summary: Sakura learns why so many ninja hope never to have a soul mate.





	1. Chapter 1

Sakura first writes to her soul mate when she is six. She has no idea where the marker will form, but she pretends it’s on her legs, on her hands, on her belly, on the tops of her feet. She draws flowers on her thighs and faces on her arms. Nobody answers, of course – nobody’s character is so formed at six years old that they actually have a soul mate.

She sees her parents do it, though. She is fascinated by how squiggles drawn on the soft-shiny patch of Kizashi’s right palm show up on Mebuki’s left. It doesn’t matter to Sakura that by and large her parents only use their gift to remind each other to get groceries or pay bills. It’s magical.

“What if,” says Kizashi, brushing her hair for her in the morning, “your mark is on your bottom?”

Sakura squeaks and squirms one hand around to poke her posterior. “I won’t be able to see,” she says, horrified.

“Well, your soul mate might,” Mebuki says cheerfully. She hikes an eyebrow at her husband, and he laughs and pats Sakura on the shoulder gently. “Don’t forget your lunch."

When Sakura begins attending the academy she finds that almost nobody in her class has their marks, and more than one of the clan kids declares they hope never to get a soul mate – a liability, they say. More trouble than it’s worth.

Ino’s parents are soul mates and ninja like Sakura’s – although more prestigious ninja, certainly – and neither of them think it’s such a liability.

“It means having someone to come home to,” says Ino.

“If they’re from the same village,” Shikamaru points out.

“Well… why wouldn’t they be?”

Soul mates are a pretty mysterious phenomenon, but they’re supposed to link people with a high degree of compatibility. Sakura’s never heard of people from different villages being linked like that, but it must happen.

“It does,” Iruka-sensei confirms with a pensive expression. Despite the protests of those who’d rather be learning something cool or at least practising throwing technique, the rest of the afternoon is given over to discussing soul mate links and information security. He’s got a lot of examples and anecdotes to tell, including some pretty hair raising ones. “One of the worst leaks in the second shinobi world war was due to a young shinobi who told his soul mate which route they were set on. Both parties were killed in the ensuing ambush, and the deaths among the Raikage’s family were the catalyst for bringing Cloud into the fighting.”

By the end of it, Sakura’s basically convinced that pictures of flowers and smiley faces might be the only acceptable way to communicate with her soul mate at all.

“Your ninja registration is as good as public information,” Mebuki says when she brings her new concerns home. “Any ninja anywhere can find out where you’re from given your writing and dialect. Your name and rank is usually safe enough. Just don’t get too specific.”

“She doesn’t need to know all this just yet,” complains Kizashi from where he’s chopping vegetables for dinner. “You don’t have a soul mate yet, do you?”

Sakura rolls her eyes. She’s nine now and of course she doesn’t, but some people in her class do. Some people like– “Sasuke-kun does,” she reports.

There’s a pause in the air, like she’s said something rude. Even the soft sounds of Kizashi’s knife are still. She doesn’t think she has. Soul mates aren’t exactly private.

“He probably does,” says Kizashi soberly, and begins chopping again.

Sakura doesn’t quite understand then. At eight, a soul mate means somebody who accepts her unconditionally, who knows her and never judges, who keeps her most private self safe between them. It means someone to come home to and somebody special to be special to. It could be a friend, a teacher, a parent, a lover – the relationship doesn’t matter. It’s the intensity of the bond that singles them out. It seems like something desirable and special. At eight, Sakura is a little bit jealous that Sasuke has one, that he knows who he’s fit for forever.

But when she’s older she knows how telling it is for somebody eight years old to have a soul mate. It means their future is carved out, their character set forever in stone. There is no force in the world that can change them now, not in the essentials.

When she’s older Sakura will recognise that the Uchiha massacre scarred Sasuke in several ways, each worse than the last.

But for now, she’s not sure about the strange pause in the air and she wants to ask what’s for dinner anyway.

When she’s ten, Kizashi is labelled missing in action. His initials are carved into the cenotaph. Sakura learns why so many ninja hope never to have a soul mate.

It might be something of a pity never to have a relationship like that, but the downside to a bond like Sakura’s parents’ is a terrible thing.

Mebuki becomes completely useless. When she’s not wandering their familiar house picking things up and putting them down like she’s never seen them before, she’s lost in dreams and figments. She writes on her hand again and again and waits to be answered.

She forgets, over and over, and each time the realisation is worse. Sakura hears her come home, hears her step at the door and her key in the lock, and she hears her call out cheerfully to her husband. _Kizashi. Anata._

The silence is suffocating, laden with implication, heavy with absence.

“Sorry,” says Mebuki, flushing red from embarrassment or anger or both.

“It’s fine,” says Sakura awkwardly, hoping to move past it. She doesn’t think Mebuki wants to discuss it and she can’t even think of making this more difficult than it already is.

But that doesn’t really change that Mebuki has bought home abalone and a punnet of strawberries instead of something for dinner. There are dark circles like bruises beneath her eyes. She forgets many things. She cannot concentrate. Sakura has to remind her to pay bills, to brush her own hair, to lock the door when she leaves.

She asks Ino because there doesn’t feel like there’s anyone else to ask. Her father is gone and her mother may as well be.

Ino has no answers for her but two days later Sakura’s remaining grandfather shows up on their doorstep with his bags at almost exactly the same time as Inoichi-san spearheads a mostly-polite home invasion to ‘take Sakura-chan off your hands for a while’.

A while turns into a week that flows into a month. Sakura and Ino are under Inoichi’s care while his soul mate takes missions outside the village. The cool humid flower shop with its shades of green and bright splashes of colour becomes familiar. The chores at the Yamanaka house become quotidian, even though they are not quite the same. Sakura and Ino become sisters and then enemies and then best friends again.

When ‘a while’ is over, Sakura returns home to find her mother has aged about a decade and gone hard around the edges.

“I’m sorry for leaving her with you so long,” she says to Inoichi on their doorstep. Her hand is tight on the edge of their painted wooden door. The garden is dry, although not yet dead.

“It was no problem,” he says. He’s very convincing and Sakura believes him, although Mebuki can probably read the exhaustion in his face. One child is hard enough for one person with his own demanding job and an absent partner.

“Thank you,” she says politely instead of contradicting him.

So Sakura returns, feeling strange and briefly out of place. It smells different now. Inside, the house is clean.

Sakura will be the first to allow that Mebuki is better than she was, but she’s also different. There’s no softness left in her. She keeps to herself. She is quiet where before she spoke, and all her patience is used up. She snaps. She is disinterested.

Sakura finds her hard to talk to and, after a time, they don’t talk very much. Where once Sakura might have discussed what she learnt that day or gossip she overheard, instead she answers questions by rote: her day was fine, class was fine, she likes Sasuke, Ino is a pig. “Do you want help with dinner?” she asks, hoping to stall any further discussion.

“Just set the table,” says Mebuki.

Dinner is quiet. When it’s not, Sakura babbles about Sasuke and Ino (mostly Sasuke), and Mebuki is detached and inattentive.

They don’t talk about Kizashi. He is remembered at their shrine, where there is incense and tangerines. His name is on the cenotaph and there is an empty grave at which they leave flowers.

Still, she’s not surprised when Mebuki retires from active duty before Sakura graduates.  That, at least, is one part of this story Sakura saw coming.

Life goes on in this vein. Sakura studies hard, in part because she’s too young to leave but she desperately wants to avoid her mother.

She finds she has a lot to say but nobody wants to hear her say it, so she usually says it in her head and stays quiet on the outside. What she does talk about are mundanities: chores, school, Sasuke. Always Sasuke.

“Sasuke-kun this, Sasuke-kun that,” Mebuki sighs. “Something else must have happened today?”

And, look, probably it did. But Sakura has very little to report that she thinks her mother will even hear, and frankly a lot of her attention is consumed by Sasuke-kun at this age. She knows he has a soul mate and she doesn’t, but sometimes she daydreams…

Well. Not all soul mates are romantic. She can still win his heart!

“Sakura. Sa-ku-ra.”

“Eh?”

Mebuki gives her an annoyed look. “Never mind. Make sure you do the dishes before bed.”

This is a rule in their house. Mebuki hates both cooking and washing dishes. Kizashi used to cheerfully trade off with her for other chores, but there’s no Kizashi now. So when Mebuki cooks, Sakura cleans the dishes.

(And when Sakura cooks the dishes pile up until Mebuki cooks again. It’s good practice, at least, for when Sakura marries Sasuke and needs to take care of their household.)

“Ahh… yes, I will,” she promises, but her mother has already gone. To bed, probably, although it’s barely eight. She sleeps a lot.

Mebuki is increasingly distant over time. She’s easily tired and easily frustrated. She spends long hours in silence before the shrine in their house and sometimes Sakura’s not sure her mother actually knows whether or not she’s at home.

It’s not fair to Sakura, but life isn’t always very fair. This, at least, stands to reason: Mebuki’s soul is split between worlds, and so is all her attention.

She fades.

At twelve, Sakura spends time with Ino and only about fifty per cent of it is bitter rivalry. Thirty per cent is when they show a united front to the equally vicious kunoichi in training at the academy. Ten per cent is looking sickly sweet at each other in front of Ino’s parents (who are by no means fooled) and the final ten is like now: sitting together over lunch under a tree. Sasuke is nowhere to be found, having escaped their combined ingenuity for the time being. Presumably, though, he’s alone, eating rice and sliced tomatoes like he does three days a week, and focused on some internal thought he’ll never share with either of them.

It’s a nice day, though: warm air, sweet smelling grass, light dappled across Sakura’s legs beneath the broad canopy of a tree. She can hear other students yelling and Akamaru barking but practice has her tuning it out before it even becomes a nuisance.

It’s good that it’s a nice day because the week has been rough and Sakura’s mood will nosedive if it rains on her lunch break. Mebuki hasn’t managed to buy groceries or clean anything, and if it weren’t for her keys moving around the house Sakura wouldn’t be sure she was even really there this week. She’s never where Sakura thinks she’ll be and she’s pretty sure she’s using her ninja training to avoid Sakura, who just this morning resorted to writing notes. She left two bills on the kitchen table and hopes that by the time she gets home the money to pay them will have mysteriously appeared nearby. They don’t need a repeat of the lights-out incident of last June.

“Maybe I don’t want to meet my soul mate,” Sakura says, tipping her head back and squinting up at the sky through the branches. It might rain later, she thinks, even though there aren’t that many clouds above yet. They’re on the horizon, moving with the breeze.

Ino makes an annoyed noise in her throat – not least because she’s been distracted from talking about Sasuke, who is her favourite topic. Usually it isn’t a hardship because he’s Sakura’s too, but today Sakura is restless.

“Don’t be stupid. You know it doesn’t make a difference.”

It’s true that the people who never actually meet their soul mates still get all weird if they die. It affects a person’s brain chemistry in ways medics haven’t quite figured out – although to be fair, soul mates in general are a thing medics haven’t quite figured out.

“It must be worse if you do know them, though,” Sakura says, setting her lunch box aside and leaning her face into her knees instead.

Ino makes a scoffing noise in her throat. Ino, Sakura knows, believes Mebuki has made it harder for herself by quitting work and not seeing her friends, and she’s rarely sympathetic. “Sure, like losing anyone you care about. That’s –” here she hesitates, then sets her teeth. “Mou, Sakura.” She’s exasperated and her voice is hard. “That happens to ninja.”

She’s talking from the perspective of somebody from a whole clan of ninja. Her parents are still alive but Sakura knows Ino has attended plenty of funerals.

“Some people deal with it better than others,” she says after that awkward pause. Then she shoves Sakura gently. “Once you’ve graduated you can move out if you want. Or if not, you can at least have your own money so you don’t have to ask her all the time.”

This is true, and will fix a lot of small but grating problems. Sakura looks forward to it.

“Anyway, as I was saying before you so rudely interrupted, Sasuke was doing that thing with his eyebrows–”

Sakura makes an attentive noise. Sasuke has few tells, but most of his expressions are communicated in the eyebrows, so they are quite important.

When she gets home, Mebuki has left her the money to pay their electricity, thank god, and Sakura feels like her week is looking up.

With training and effort and the increased responsibility of making sure her mother hasn’t completely lost it, time passes. Sakura still scribbles on patches of her skin. Now she feels uncertain about it and each mark is more like a compulsive return to habit than a genuine effort to communicate with whoever may one day be hers. She’s still tickled to think that someone may be waiting for their skin to show her marks, but she’s much warier about what it could mean.

As their cohort grows they get older until it’s not strange for them to have soul mates of their own. At six or eight it is strange, but at twelve or thirteen more than one of them has a character fixed enough that their marks settle.

“Well, maybe he’s younger,” Ino suggests while they jog side by side. Neither is breathless. The academy’s curriculum requires frequent conditioning exercise, and they are both used to this.

Ino is annoyed that she’s not yet developed a bond. There are other girls in their class who have them, mostly those who spend time scribbling on their skin instead of paying attention. Ino does not like to be shown up at anything. “If he’s younger he might not be able to have a bond yet.”

This is true, but given that they’re twelve, it’s equally possible that they aren’t developed enough for one yet. Soul mate bonds tend to become fixed after major life events or big decisions; things from which there’s no coming back.

Sakura rolls her eyes a little, and gets elbowed for her trouble, although not very hard. They run on, putting on speed when Iruka-sensei snaps at them that they’re meant to be trying harder. The sky is blue and Sakura can hear the low buzz of insects. Summer seems endless.

For whatever reason, both she and Ino graduate without soul marks.

That’s fine to Sakura, really. Ino might be impatient, but Sakura’s in no rush. Besides, Sasuke already has one, and it’s not either of them – so it can’t form part of their rivalry over him. Whoever they are, they’re lucky. Sasuke’s … he’s very cool, and he makes Sakura’s chest all light and fluttery.

To be honest, Sakura feels a little like she’s winning their Sasuke-centric rivalry right now, having been put on a team with him. She lords this over Ino quite smugly. Ino fumes, and Sakura delights in it. As much as she likes winning, she also loves Ino’s attention.

Being stuck on a team with Naruto is disappointing and sometimes bewildering. Being put on a team with Sasuke is… well, not quite the delight Sakura would like, although she has hope their relationship will improve with time and familiarity. She’s definitely going to make him fall in love with her.

Kakashi-sensei is also frustrating and disappointing. He’s supposed to be some kind of elite ninja, but other than the first day when he tested them – and forced Sakura to view a pretty awful illusion about Sasuke-kun dying slowly while she waited, helpless, for it to be over and for him to stop begging her for help (and so much for her being a _genjutsu type_ after all) – he’s careless and laid back and as far as Sakura can tell he’s not even a little bit interested in teaching them anything at all.

Naruto and even Sasuke start coming later and later to team meetings. Sakura knows she ought not to bother either, but she’s a creature of anxiety. She feels like the first time she fails to show up on time is the first time Kakashi will be there when he says he will.

So she follows her routine: she gets up early, goes running as they were taught in the academy, does the same academy kata she knows how to do, makes breakfast for two and leaves the remains covered on the stove top for her mother. She’s always on time. Kakashi… isn’t.

Missions are not what Sakura expects at all. She knows better than to think they’ll be given anything important to do straight off, but she’s also not expecting what they do get. Babysitting, weeding, grocery shopping for rich elders, dog walking – for heaven’s sakes, Sakura spends three days fishing rubbish from the river, and if she never sees that cat again it’ll be too soon. Her hands are blistered not from training or fighting, but from weeding for four hours straight.

If a civilian wants to have a career in child-minding, they don’t go to ninja school for it. Or… Sakura never thought they did, at least. Maybe all Konoha babysitters are genin and she’s just never noticed.

“D-ranks are like that,” says Mebuki. She glances at Sakura’s hands, detached and unsympathetic.

Sakura knows that being a genin is supposed to be about learning how their administrative system works, how to run a low-priority mission safely and sensibly and how to work in a group. But the fact remains that a great deal of their work as ninja is going to involve fighting or sneaking, and she’s not learning anything at all about that.

She wonders, but nobody is telling her any different. Kakashi-sensei doesn’t answer any questions, slippery and hard to corner. Sakura will occasionally try to get Sasuke to train with her but she desperately doesn’t want to spend any more time with Naruto than she has to, so–

So she runs, she does her academy-level kata, she reads up on general principles when she’s at home. She completes D-rank missions with her team and gets paid a modest sum for them.

It seems like her life has settled into a routine – a nervous, unhappy routine, one she doesn’t like where she feels like she’s doing something wrong more often than not and where Sasuke hates her and Naruto won’t leave her alone and Mebuki ghosts through the backdrop of her days, unhelpful and uncommunicative – and while she doesn’t necessarily like it she knows she can do it. She has forward momentum and as long as she doesn’t slow down or rest she can cruise along like this indefinitely.

Then Naruto cracks and demands a less menial, less stupid mission.

She… sort of gets where he’s coming from. She’s not sure if the expression on her face matches the grim and grudging agreement on Sasuke’s, but she definitely feels it.

Sakura would never have screeched it right at Hokage-sama’s face the way Naruto does, but she also can’t disagree. The D-rank missions aren’t tasks that require any of the skills that she’s spent all this time learning, and she feels sort of demeaned by a lot of them.

“…you’re just kids,” is one of the first things Tazuna says.

Tazuna is on the bad side of fifty, grey haired, not very clean, and clearly already tipsy, which, given that it has only just gone noon, is not a good sign.

Sakura doesn’t have a lot of experience with drunken adults. Mebuki is not a heavy drinker, thankfully, and Inoichi doesn’t drink at all – Sakura has heard him say (pleasantly, but with teeth) that mind altering drugs are for subjects, not interrogators.

Still, the mission parameters seem more or less straightforward, even if their client is drunk and rude – escort the bridge builder, stand guard over him while he makes his bridge, then leave and come home. Sakura’s not sure how the bridge is supposed to be less vulnerable once it’s been built, since well placed explosives are likely to take it down either way, but she isn’t being paid to ask that sort of question.

As a C-rank mission, it will pay a lot more than the average D-rank, even if it takes longer. It will take a lot longer, though – a week, at least. Certainly the longest Sakura’s ever been away from the village.

“Maa,” yawns Kakashi, “Well. Go get packed. We’ll get going in the morning while there’s still plenty of daylight for travelling…”

That is, Sakura assumes, predicated on the assumption that Kakashi will actually show up at the village gates on time.

She returns to her house and finds that Mebuki is at their shrine, murmuring quietly to herself with her eyes fixed on the photograph of Kizashi. The house smells of incense. It is in their central room, the one with the squashy couch and the dining table that rarely gets used anymore.

Sakura feels clumsy and awkward intruding, but she can‘t disappear for a whole week and just hope her mother won‘t notice, so she interrupts as delicately as she knows how. “I’m going away for a week, with my team. It’s my first C-rank mission. I’m just – I’ll be gone. For a week.”

There’s a long silence. Well, all right then.

Just as Sakura thinks she’s done and can leave, slip past and head up to her bedroom to pack, Mebuki speaks. She doesn’t look away from her soul mate’s picture, and her voice is low and thoughtful. “People’s first C-rank missions have a way of going badly.”

Politeness keeps Sakura in the doorway. “…do they?”

“It’s sort of a rule. Something always goes wrong, and new genin don’t usually have the experience to stop it from making the mission a bit of a disaster…” her gaze is distant, but then it sharpens and she looks back toward Sakura. “It’s your first C-rank, you said?”

Yes, Sakura just said that. She nods.

“Come in here,” she says, turning away from the shrine. “Sit down.”

Sakura perches upon the seat opposite her mother. She feels every inch of the table between them like a mile.

“Do you remember why you wanted to be a ninja in the first place, Sakura?”

She blinks. This isn’t… well, Sakura isn’t sure what she expected, but this line of questioning isn’t it. “I–”

No, she doesn’t. Not really. Now days, she wants to be good to impress Sasuke-kun more often than not. Otherwise it’s mostly because she never could back down from a challenge. Too much pride.

She doesn’t say anything because she can’t think of anything to say. Mostly she wishes she could leave and get packing. There’s not a lot Mebuki can say to her that Sakura needs to hear.

“I know we haven’t talked as much lately as we used to,” Mebuki begins, looking uncomfortable, “and I know that’s partly my fault–”

 _Partly_ , Sakura thinks in the privacy of her mind. _Partly_? She feels a thin and bitter anger bubble up in her blood. Does this mean it’s supposed to be partly Sakura’s fault? Because it’s not.

With effort, Sakura gives her a blank and attentive look, and never mind her twitching eyebrow.

“But if you’re serious about this – about being a ninja – you have to stop daydreaming.”

Sakura feels like she’s suffocating on the sheer gall of her mother’s hypocrisy.

“You used to –” she pauses here, face tight. “All this worrying about how you look and whatever Sasuke-kun thinks, and, Sakura,” her mouth thins down, grim and serious now. “Sakura, your father died on a mission for this village. A B-ranked mission. You don’t – your job is serious. Being a ninja, it’s serious. Dangerous. You need to take it seriously.”

It’s the first time Mebuki has looked at her – really looked _at_ her, not through her – in weeks, and Sakura can’t even appreciate it because she’s too angry. She’s boiling inside, bitter and raging even as she forces her face into a polite smile.

“I’ll be sure to do that,” she says tightly, as much through her resentment as through her teeth.

Mebuki looks at her, flushed and frustrated.

She must see something in Sakura’s face, because her expression rapidly darkens. “Oh, just go,” she snaps, and gets back up.

Seething, Sakura does.

She packs her bag in a mess of temper, shoving things in and pulling them out again, cranky and annoyed. Her hair sticks to the back of her neck and her eyes feel scratchy and it takes her half an hour before she sits back on her bed and makes a sincere effort to calm down.

“Ignore her,” she mutters to herself, in spite of the voice inside her that snarls _that bitch!_ and screeches its resentment like some kind of demented bird. She takes a few deep breaths and makes the effort to redirect her thoughts.

She doesn’t feel happy but she’s distracted by work. Her bag needs packing, but it’s small and the trip is long.

After a moment, she digs out one of her academy texts and refers to the pages on packing for foreign countries. Then, thoughtfully, she looks for a book on the geography and climate of Wave. No point bringing a swimsuit to the snow, after all.

(It turns out that there’s no snow in Wave. But she won’t need a swimsuit, either.)

By the time morning comes around and she leaves to meet up with her team, Mebuki is nowhere to be seen. Sakura doesn’t bother leaving a goodbye note; she’s already told her what she needs to know.

* * *

Tazuna is less drunk in the morning.  The day dawns still and sunny, with no hint of rain on the horizon. The birds are awake before the party leaves, but the heavy buzz of insect life won’t fill the air until the sun gets higher.

Despite herself, and despite her double and triple-checking, Sakura feels like she’s probably packed the wrong things, like she’s not at all ready for whatever’s coming. She’s also excited, anticipatory; this is her first real mission.

The gates are huge and daunting. She’s never been outside them without her parents before, although she knows better than to dance around and scream about it. On that specific note, Naruto is loud and ignorant and she grinds her teeth against his loud and grating voice. Seriously, does he have to?

Otherwise, Sasuke is quiet and cool. Kakashi presides in benevolent negligence, more interested in his book than his students, but at least he’s not too late.

Then they start walking.

Sakura’s excitement wanes after about twenty minutes and after the first hour it’s basically a fond memory.

They make the time go faster by talking about the elemental nations and Wave’s place among them, and despite all appearances - and his insinuations about their competence - Tazuna turns out to be relatively friendly.

Sakura’s not so inattentive she can’t see that he’s still nervous, though, and she wonders why. Their road isn’t that dangerous, and even if he doesn’t think they can help him - although Sakura’s pretty sure they can definitely take down untrained bandits - Tazuna should have some faith in Kakashi, at least. She wonders if it’s just because he’s hungover or something.

The puddle seems innocuous to her.

It’s not.

Sakura’s first real taste of combat comes when two wild-eyed assassins melt out of the ground, race around with swift thundering footsteps and take out Kakashi in one coordinated attack.

They have shadowed eyes, identical faces, a killing intent that rolls over her mind and almost drags her under. Each has one huge metal hand, all sharp and spiked like the vicious offspring of a gauntlet and a bagh naka.

And Sakura realises that she must protect their stupid drunken bridge builder with her whole body.

She doesn’t want to. She doesn’t want to feel those claws with her skin and she thinks she probably will. She doesn’t like it. Doesn’t like _him_. But it’s her job and Sakura takes her obligations seriously, whatever anybody thinks of her – and like that, she moves.

Her feet are sure, and even if her heart is thundering in her ears and her whole body feels like it’s alight, the knife in her hand comes up quickly and steadily. She is defensive, she is ready. She is terrified.

Sasuke steps in front of her, close enough that she can smell his hair and feel the heat of his skin.

Everything slows. Her heart stops.

What’s he doing? He’s going to get _killed_.

There is a crunch and a thump, the telltale smell of leaves, and before she can even think the thought all the way through Kakashi is there again.

The fight is over, the ‘Demon Brothers’ stopped, and Sakura is still terrified.

“You did well,” Kakashi tells her, abrupt like the praise sits ill with him, and he turns away to interrogate Tazuna.

Sakura can’t concentrate on whatever Naruto and Sasuke are getting into. The fight is over but her heart won’t steady and she feels like she’s walking through soup, one step in front of the other. Nothing reaches her.

The fight is over.

“You really…” Tazuna looks at her uncertainly.

Startled, she blinks at him.

“Never mind.”

Wave, when they get there, is all wooden houses with slate roofing. The paths are dirt with grooves worn deep from carts and wagons, and Sakura can smell the sea wherever she goes. The trees and grass here are bright green, healthy and verdant, but the village itself has a distinctly derelict feel.

They meet Zabuza between the docks and Tazuna’s quiet cottage home and that’s when the mission really goes belly-up.

In hindsight, Sakura finds him luridly strange: this six foot man in cow print clothing with his eyebrows shaved off and his mouth covered. His sword is huge but it’s missing big circles and reminds her of a cheese knife.

At the time all she can feel is his killing intent. It rises, mortal dread in her throat and numbing her hands, and it is murky and huge and implacable, a tsunami swelling on the horizon. She thinks she could die from it, just from her heart rabbiting wildly in her chest, faster and faster until it – stops.

Tazuna makes a helpless rattling noise in his chest.

Sakura knows why Sasuke’s shaking. Even Naruto goes still under its pressure.

By the time the fighting is over, Zabuza has been removed by a soft-spoken hunter nin of dubious provenance and Kakashi’s passed out. Sasuke is walking carefully and doggedly, exhausted. Naruto has Kakashi over his shoulders one arm hooked around his arm and the other around his leg.

Tazuna is trembling beside her and Sakura is acutely aware that she’s the only one who’s still in fighting form. Another enemy like Zabuza – hell, another enemy like either of the Demon Brothers – will do them in.

They make it to Tazuna’s house, but it is not a comfort. All they get is sturdy walls – not really an obstacle to a ninja – fish for every meal (fish, Sakura gathers, is the one thing the people on this island _can_ afford) and Inari’s dead-eyed stare.

Inari’s young to have lost his soul mate – he’s absurdly young to have found him in the first place, although a child from a poor land who loses his father so early has a better chance than most – but Sakura feels like she’d know that look anywhere.

He stares a lot, and when he can be persuaded to express anything it’s usually anger. Tsunami clearly worries, but it is a sedate, worn worry.

Naruto finds him even more grating than Sakura does, and he has less tact about it.

“People get strange when they lose their soul mates,” Sasuke says, and that’s the last comment he’ll make about it. He gets up from the table to run a perimeter check, which is probably a good idea.

“How does he even know that Kaiza guy was his soul mate?” Naruto wonders, rolling his eyes. “The kid’s _nine_.”

Sakura thinks of the expression on Inari’s face, of his shadowed eyes and shaking hands. She sighs. “I think he probably was,” she says.

Naruto turns to her. “Eh? Why?”

She shakes her head then. She doesn’t really want to talk about why, and Naruto’s annoying at the best of times.  Their sensei is comatose and if Gato has any more missing-nin in his employ they’re probably going to die, but even now, he’s loud and overconfident.

Sakura thanks Tsunami for their meal - fish, of course - and goes to check on Kakashi instead.Of all of them, she’s the only one who has even a strong theoretical understanding of first aid.

She wishes Kakashi would wake up, because she’s lost and her stomach is in knots. They have no real experience with this kind of mission, they don’t know how best to defend a house – although she can make some guesses, she supposes, factoring in obstacles and height advantage and the value of distraction – and worse still, Tazuna needs to get back to actually building his bridge. That will be even worse.

Even when Kakashi does wake it doesn’t assuage her gnawing anxiety much. He’s weakened and exhausted, and he shuffles around on a crutch for a day.

He seems to realise that he’s neglected to teach any of them much of anything, and goes about trying to fix that by assigning them a tree-walking exercise in the forests of Wave. They’re not to do anything much else until they know how to do it.

For a change, Sakura feels like she’s capable of something: she succeeds easily on her first try, because _this is easy_. She climbs up effortlessly and sits on a mid-height branch, kicking her feet. Her chakra helps her stick, and getting the perfect amount to come out requires almost no thought. She knows she doesn’t have a lot of chakra, but her control has always been excellent – all of her teachers said so.

Her victory is soured by the way Sasuke looks at her. His eyes are always dark, but now they’re cold, too. Both of them know she is not better than he is, but it seems to annoy him that she’s succeeded at this specific thing before him.

Kakashi looks between them and lazily points it out. “Maybe the Uchiha clan isn’t so great, mm?”

She knows he means to motivate Sasuke because that much is obvious, but –

Sasuke gives her a look of pure malice and she grinds her teeth, glowering down at her teacher. He pretends he doesn’t notice.

Learning the new skill doesn’t reduce the nagging anxiety in her belly much anyway. Tree walking won’t keep them alive against Zabuza, especially not if the hunter nin is his ally as Kakashi suspects.

She hopes the hunter nin isn’t his ally, and that he’s been killed and destroyed. She doubts that’s the case but she desperately wants it to be.

The mission does not get better.

It gets worse.

The conflict at the bridge is – it feels huge.

Sakura does nothing. She helps nobody, she feels stiff and useless. She stays with Tazuna, taking an absurd comfort from his big warm body in the sightless grey of Zabuza’s mist.

Sakura is terrified and she does nothing.

The fake hunter nin dies, Zabuza dies, Sasuke dies, Gatou dies – there’s blood on the beams and a huge gouge ripped out of the wood, and the tang of rusty iron drives back even the smell of the ocean. Beneath that is burning hair and cooking meat, the product of Kakashi’s lightning technique.

Sakura doesn’t even succeed in following the most basic ninja rules. She cries over Sasuke. It’s impossible not to.

She doesn’t even know what she feels when he opens his eyes again. It burns through her, bleak and terrible and overwhelming, and she makes a choked stupid noise and flings herself at him, grabbing close and hanging on for dear life.

“Ow,” he hisses, and she pulls him closer. She doesn’t care. She can’t even tell if she’s relieved. She’s just… overwhelmed.

It is a terrible mission.

They name the bridge after Naruto, and she doesn’t begrudge them that because Naruto is the brightest of them, the one who makes the greatest impact on the people of Wave – and on Tazuna and Inari specifically.

When they leave, the shadows aren’t gone from Inari’s face. They never will be. But they’ve receded a little, and Sakura marvels a bit inside because she knows how hard that is to achieve.

Theirs is a long, hard walk home. Kakashi is limping, but it doesn’t seem to affect his outlook any – he buries his nose in his book and returns to overseeing them with an unconcerned air. Sakura thinks he’s watching a lot more closely than she can tell. She feels better about him now that she knows he’ll fight tooth and nail for them if he must.

“Haku,” says Naruto as they walk back, drained both physically and mentally, “he said being a soul mate means… knowing you’re important to somebody, even if it’s just as a tool.”

Sasuke ignores him, deep in pensive silence, and Sakura’s not sure she has it in her to talk to Naruto right now. Any conversation with Naruto requires a lot of energy. She feels like she’s… just tapped out. All of her emotions have run out and now she’s empty of them, numb until she processes this latest mess.

“Aa?” Kakashi asks. “Are you thinking about yours?”

Sakura blinks. She hadn’t known Naruto even – but of course he does. He’s been the same for as long as she’s known him, and even this hellish mission hasn’t changed his attitude. Not in the essentials. Like Sasuke’s, his personality isn’t likely to change. The only reason somebody like Naruto wouldn’t have a soul mate yet would be if his was too young yet to match – or if no person in the world existed who could match him, which…

…actually…

Now Sakura is trying to think of what sort of person might have Naruto as a soul mate and she is coming up blank.

Maybe Teuchi, the ramen-shop man. This would make a lot of things make a lot more sense.

“Ah… yeah, a little. Maybe.” For once, Naruto sounds – not sullen, but not enthusiastic either. Odd.

“Mm,” says Kakashi thoughtfully.

Come to think of it, Sakura has never seen Kakashi write to his soul mate, or even mention whether or not he has one. Given that Kakashi is an elite ninja, though, Sakura is a little scared to ask; it might turn out that his soul mate is dead.

If his soul mate is dead, he’s a lot better at hiding it than Mebuki ever was.

Thinking of her mother drags Sakura’s thoughts back to what she said before this mission started.

_Your job is serious. Being a ninja, it’s serious. Dangerous. You need to take it seriously._

That’s… an understatement. She feels old and broken and like she’s already lost too much of herself, and abruptly she misses her father.

 _Do you remember why you wanted to be a ninja in the first place, Sakura?_ Mebuki had asked, and the worst thing is that Sakura does remember.

She resents Mebuki, she pities Mebuki, she’s sick and tired of her now but –

When Sakura was young, younger even than she clearly remembers, she wanted what all young children want: she wanted to be just like her mother.

That’s why.

She remembers that now, thinking her mother was so capable, so strong, never helpless. It’s only now that she’s grown up that she understands that Mebuki is just flawed as anyone, given the right circumstances.

Sakura was useless and helpless on this mission and she knows it. This mission, this terrible, awful mission, is a taste of what her life is going to be like as a ninja. Sakura knows it, and the thought makes her scared.

She seriously contemplates resigning – her contract requires that she serve for at least two years, but she could spend that time doing boring D-rank missions and find another profession as a civilian. Fourteen is not too old for an apprenticeship. She can’t think of what another profession might actually be, because she doesn’t really want one, but…

The civilians of Wave country are helpless too. Helpless and useless, like Kaiza. Like Inari with his thousand yard stare.

Sakura doesn’t want that for herself, either.

The miles roll under her feet as she thinks. The muddy path changes to a loose dirt and Fire country’s huge trees encroach on the scenery, lending their shade and their enormous comforting shadows to the trek.

It seems like she agrees with Mebuki after all. Being a ninja is serious and dangerous and she has to take it seriously. She thought she was, but – she wasn’t. And now she knows.

 _Fine_ , she thinks, mostly to the raging voice inside her. _I won’t be helpless again._

There’s a tiny part of her that reminds her of death on the bridge, of brown stains that won’t come out and the rich smells rising from a gaping wound. Death, it reminds her, is a thing before which everybody is helpless.

She swallows.

Well, that’s –

Her arm stings, more shocking than painful, and she squeaks and claps her hand to it.

“Sakura?” Kakashi’s voice is much closer than she thought.

“Just a – an insect bite or something,” she says, unnerved, and peers at her arm. She ignores the derisive noise Sasuke makes, because there’s something…

The skin on her forearm is paler than it should be. Soft, like the rest of her skin, but discoloured like a graft.

“Ah,” says Kakashi, much more quietly, leaning over to peer at the spot on her arm she can’t stop staring at. “Your soul mate could use some sun, hm?”

She swallows. “I…”

She thinks she should write, write quickly, immediately, but she doesn’t know what to say.

Kakashi pats her on the shoulder and, having ascertained that she isn’t bleeding, dying or on fire, continues forward to take up his position between Sasuke and Naruto. They haven’t spoken to each other since the bridge, and it’s probably wise to give them Kakashi as a buffer.

Sakura rubs her thumb over the pale patch of skin on the inside of her forearm.

She doesn't know what to say.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...And then, eighteen thousand words later, I finished the second chapter.
> 
> (Nb: YourIdiotWriter proof read the first half of this chapter for me! She did a good job and picked out my dumb typos but more importantly she also made comments in the vein of _it's fine, keep writing, write the writes_ and so the eight thousand words that came after that conversation are also partially attributable to her intercession. The typos aren't though.  >.>)

Sakura's resolution to be less helpless and more useful follows her home to Konoha. She knows her weaknesses: low stamina, low strength, limited chakra supply. Her strengths are... harder to pinpoint. Good chakra control, good memorisation skills, above-average critical analysis. These are, unfortunately, pretty secondary skills for most ninja. Useful, but not strictly critical.

She knows she is supposedly a 'genjutsu type', which presumably means that she has an aptitude for illusions, but genjutsu isn't taught at the academy. Sakura has only nebulous ideas as to where she can start looking for more information about illusions, and...

Honestly she's already kind of distracted. She has so many things to think about.

Sakura puts off talking to her soul mate. She holds a pen over the pale skin on her forearm several times when they stop for the night, poised to write, but... she stops herself, again and again, even as she's berating herself for it.

It's not a long journey back to the village but...

It's something she's been anticipating for such a long time that she's not sure why she's hesitating now.

How hard is it to say hello?

Well. Hard, as it turns out.

She doesn't tell Mebuki about her soul mate or her mission, either. She thinks about it, but in the end all she can really see happening is an argument. She hasn't seen her mother for what feels like a lifetime but she takes two steps inside, breathes in the smell of incense and bleach, and discovers that she's already sick of her.

"Tadaima," she says instead, kicking off her shoes. She can see her mother's keys by the door but she doesn't get an answer.

She only takes the time to shower before she goes to her desk. For a mission that goes as badly off-course as theirs, everybody must submit a report. She thinks it's probably best to do it while events are still fresh, no matter how weary she feels. This sentiment is predicated on the idea that she will ever forget some of the things that have happened in the last week, which seems unlikely to her at this moment.

Sakura writes her report meticulously, adding in every detail she can think of and some that she actually thought she'd forgotten - her fingers cramp and she looks at her arm and wonders why this is so easy but 'hello' is so hard.

Finally she shoves her report away from her and grips her pen hard.

'Hello,' she writes, not very neatly, just to get it over with. Her soul mate is going to think she has awful handwriting. Her soul mate is going to think she's inane and vapid.

The second she's written it, sitting in her room with the sunset glowing golden across her desk, she regrets it. Hello? Who writes _hello_ to her soul mate?

Right now Sakura forgets all the times when her parents would write 'pls more toilet paper' and 'gas bill? :'(' to each other, or scribble silly hearts and flowers. She forgets seeing Inoichi twitch and peer down just to see the 'mission run long/am safe/thurs? < 3 < 3' scrawl itself across his ankle.

Sakura is still and quiet, staring at her own arm even past the smudge of ink on her report. She wishes she never wrote now. Surely even silence is better than something as stupid and mundane as -

There's a strange sensation, just dragging pressure along her skin. 'Hello' blurs, then fades, and is rapidly replaced.

'I wondered if you'd write.'

Sakura swallows. Her heart's in her throat. There, on her skin, right there - _somebody's writing back_.

She knows this happens to most people and she expected it to happen to her, but now that it's actually right there, she's sort of lost.

'Sorry,' she scribbles, almost automatically. She's not entirely certain why she's apologising. Her soul mate could have written to her, after all.

'It has been a very long time since I last thought I might have a soul mate,' comes right on the heels of her apology. 'How old are you?'

'You're older, then?' she pens back, smudging the characters in her haste. That seems likely. Their script looks so old-fashioned, more like brush strokes than anything from a pen nib. It's neater than Sakura's, although Sakura's writing is all over the place right now. 'I'm -' well, she's almost thirteen. She figures it counts. 'Thirteen.'

'So young,' her soul mate marvels. She has a new insecurity now. How old are they? Is she so childish and boring to them? How...

'Something must have happened,' they write. 'Tell me.'

And - well, yes. Of course her soul mate wants to know what kind of event might have caused their connection. If they're older, it's her they've been waiting on all this time. This particular connection, at this particular time is...

Well, she can probably guess exactly why it's come about now.

'It was a mission,' she writes, 'It was supposed to be lower ranked than it was.' She can't fathom a world where her soul mate, with the mark appearing on her skin now, isn't a ninja. It's unthinkable.

But it doesn't automatically follow that they are a Konoha ninja. She knows this from her classes, just as she knows that telling your soul mate mission details is a poor habit to form.

Sakura braces herself for cajoling or prying or worse still, outright rejection, but she knows better than to blurt out all the details.

'Ah,' writes her soul mate. 'I see. Which village?'

She hesitates.

It seems like forever ago, but distantly she remembers her mother telling her: _your ninja registration is as good as public information_ , telling her _any ninja can find out where you're from given your writing and dialect_ , telling her _your name and rank is usually safe enough_.

It's a distant memory, years and years past, but it's a fond one too. It's from before - before Kizashi's death, before Mebuki's change.

Still, she hesitates.

Then finally she gives it to them, because they're bound to learn and it's _usually safe enough._

She gives them her name, her rank and her village - all of which reveals its own information, she's well aware. There's a lot of information attached to knowing which village somebody is from, knowing their sex and any other demographic information.

'Leaf?' her soul mate writes, and then there's a pause before she feels that strange dragging sensation along her skin again. 'I have no village for now,' they write casually. 'Although my last rank was jounin, and I'm currently travelling in Wind country.'

And... Sakura can read between the lines there.

Sakura's soul mate is a _missing nin._

She doesn't know how she feels about that.

 _Why did you leave?_ she wants to ask. And more damning still: _What did you do?_

She doesn't write for more information. She won't tell them any compromising details herself so she has no good justification to ask it of them.

But she does wonder. A jounin-level missing nin. It brings Zabuza to mind. Of course it does - both because of her recent experiences and because he is so faithful to the stereotype of a missing nin: powerful and frightening, merciless and bloodthirsty. Is her soul mate someone like that? Is she then to be like Haku, a doe-eyed tool languishing in their huge shadow?

Sakura looks at her arm, unblinking, for a few long moments. She rubs the precise brush marks away with her thumb and they go easily, although there's no ink on her hand when she looks.

She's not sure what to say. Her classes have covered what is and isn't acceptable if a ninja is from another village, but never...

Ideally, when a ninja discovers a missing nin's whereabouts, she extracts what information she can and turns it in to intel. Sakura knows this. Ninja outside the villages are a constant nuisance to the system, but -

Well. This is her soul mate. Sakura can no more bring herself to endanger them than she can fly to the moon. Even now, she feels the toft tug of more writing on her skin and it makes her heart kick up, anticipatory. For a second she thinks she can feel the chemicals slipping between synapses in her brain, tickling, invasive. She knows she can't, not really, but the idea lingers.

Hopefully she peers at the writing on her arm, direct to her from an elite missing nin somewhere in the world. She cannot help herself.

'Is it frightening?'

Sakura chews her bottom lip for a second. Is she scared? Of criminals operating outside the villages' authority, without any restrictions on their behaviour? Of the soul mate bond itself?

To be honest... a little.

The question is fairly detached, and she's not sure what tone she ought to take from it. It's hard to read a lot into her soul mate's writing either way: they write politely, with indirect language that implies more than states. But her soul mate, presumably, wouldn't want her to be scared.

'It's surprising,' she writes, which is true even if it's not the whole truth. 'What's your name?'

There's a long pause, and Sakura tips her head back. She looks at her ceiling and she wonders. Has her soul mate gotten distracted? Or are they unsure how to answer?

She feels the words on her skin before she sees them. She can almost feel the tracing of a brush, if she concentrates hard enough on it, although she could never pick the characters from the sensation. She feels excitement flutter under her breastbone.

'I won't write it,' reads the writing. It's still print-perfect, quick, decisive. 'I'd rather not for now.'

Sakura stares. Her soul mate... won't tell her their name?

Well that's...

That's...

Sakura expects many things from her soul mate bond. Some are awful and some are cautiously optimistic, but this is... not among any of her expectations.

She sits back in her desk chair and, after a second, goes back to her report. She's slower now, puzzling through the idea in her head even as she writes. She's sure her writing has become less concise and more rambling and reflective as she goes, but given the report Naruto's likely to turn in she's sure to look conscientious by comparison.

In the end, it's obvious her soul mate doesn't trust her at all. On one level, Sakura is offended. They're _soul mates_. But she's also a ninja, with parents who are ninja and friends who are ninja. She understands the necessity of information security. And she understands that it's very hard to take back a secret once shared. It's probably even worse for a missing nin who has no support system in place.

But... a _name._

Surely that's not such a secret.

Sakura thinks about it. She thinks about it while she finishes her report and she thinks about it for the thirty six seconds between crawling onto her bed and falling asleep. She thinks about it when she meets up with her team the next morning - in stilted silence - and she contemplates it while she's waiting for Kakashi, listening to the rush of the river beneath the bridge.

She has to take a break from thinking about it when Kakashi finally arrives, but it simmers on the back burner.

In the meantime, she takes a dim view of Kakashi's tactics with their team: he acts as though he can't tell anything's even different between Naruto and Sasuke, as though there's nothing awkward about this silence.

Sakura watches his eye drift from Sasuke to herself and over to Naruto before he forces a deeply insincere smile and addresses them. She thinks Kakashi just doesn't want to - or worse, has no idea _how_ to - address the situation between those two. It's not like Sakura does, either, but she's not supposed to be their teacher.

They embark on a D-rank mission that involves cleaning up the very river their bridge is perched over. On one level, it's perfect because they can barely hear each other over the noise of the swift-flowing water so they can all pretend that's why it's so quiet. On the other hand, it's messy, muddy, laborious work and Sakura wants to strangle every person in Konoha who's ever dumped rubbish into the river.

In theory, their plans for today begin with a mission and end with training, but Kakashi-sensei takes a lax approach to anything like actual training. Their mission to Wave, unfortunately, changes nothing about Kakashi-sensei.

Sakura's understanding of him is different, less disparaging and more confused, but he is the same in essentials.

Sakura is still not sure she thinks very highly of him as a teacher.

A ninja, sure. A teacher... well.

"Ne, Kakashi-sensei," she says, once they're damp and cranky but finished with the mission. Sasuke and Naruto don't even look tired. "We didn't cover much about genjutsu in the academy."

"Ahh..." Kakashi eyes her over the edge of his book, like he's faintly annoyed about being caught out and forced to engage. "You were pegged as a genjutsu type by your teachers," he says finally.

Yes. Sakura knows this. It's why she is asking.

"Do you know anything about it?" she prompts. They've returned to where they started at the training area near the bridge, little the worse for wear. It's afternoon now and the sky is darkening with the threat of a storm. The air is still warm but now it's heavy, and when she breathes in Sakura can taste rain. She's glad she brought the washing in.

"...I suppose I can tell you a bit," he says finally.

"What's genjutsu?" Naruto interrupts immediately.

There's a pause.

Sasuke makes a singularly disgusted noise, which is the most Sakura has heard from him in days.

" _Naruto_ ," Sakura hisses, and leans over to smack him. "Did you _never_ listen in class?"

"Ow. Sakura-chan-"

She hits him again. _Idiot_.

"Better start with the basics, then," Kakashi drawls, as she was afraid he might. "Sakura?"

Sakura frowns. She's not asking for more information just so _she_ can be forced to explain genjutsu 101 to the village idiot.

Hopefully she'll be able to pin Kakashi down after racing through the basic definition with Naruto. So she takes a deep breath, stifles the steadily rising irritation inside her, and begins: "Genjutsu is the category of techniques that affect a target's nervous system, altering what they perceive with their senses-"

"Sakura-chan, Sakura-chan, what does that mean?"

Sakura grinds her teeth. "Other people put their chakra in you to make you see and feel things that aren't there," she says stiffly. And now, she thinks, it's probably lucky she _doesn't_ know any genjutsu, because there's a strong chance she'd have cast one upon Naruto if she did.

Sasuke kicks a rock. "This is a waste of time."

Quietly, Kakashi hums. It's unclear whether he agrees or not.

Sakura gives her explanation in tiny words for Naruto's benefit - surely not for anybody else's, because she, Sasuke and Kakashi all clearly know this information. Once she's done. Kakashi makes a single, lackadaisical attempt to explain some of the finer points of actually executing genjutsu - but all Sakura learns is that people who are serious about genjutsu learn a lot of psychology, because that's about when Naruto's attention drifts.

In about three minutes, Sasuke is baiting him and Naruto's hair's standing on end like an angry cat's.

Kakashi breaks off his attempt at education to supervise the growing argument.

Later, Sakura makes one further effort to pry some information out of Kakashi. "Kakashi-sensei," she starts, and he looks lazily up from his book again, "About genjutsu-"

"What difference does it make?" Sasuke interrupts, annoyed. "The sharingan can break any genjutsu, and cast most of them. This is a waste of time."

Kakashi doesn't agree... in so many words, anyway. But he also doesn't go into further detail for them. The topic is dropped.

Sakura isn't used to feeling annoyed at Sasuke, but that is definitely what this feeling is.

In a way his irritation makes sense - fully half of their team has access to the sharingan, which makes her wish to learn about genjutsu redundant. Perhaps he is right and team training should only be for things that will benefit the team overall. That's probably what he's getting at. Sasuke is, after all, very smart.

Her annoyance wanes quickly.

Sakura wants to be part of the team but she is also an individual, and she wants to be stronger on those terms, not just a cog in a machine. Among her other reasons, she recognises that she'd be stupid to think she'll never be separated from her team.

In the end she decides she'll need to find some other way to learn more about genjutsu.

Unfortunately, Sakura has nowhere else to go for sources of, well, _non_ -team training.

The rain that's been threatening breaks while she's walking home, and between one moment and the next it seems like the sky is falling. Sakura is soaked in seconds.

Between houses, she sees a ninja all in green dashing madly, blurring the air, trying to dodge the falling droplets - absurd, obviously, but perhaps he's having fun. Sakura knows no amount of running will keep her dry or clean, so she takes her time walking through it.

The thunder is loud. The clouds are heavy and dark and when lightning flashes across the sky it sears her eyes and leaves her blinking, light-blind, stunned.

She gets home and has to wring her hair out on the stoop. It's oddly delightful.

Nothing inside smells of incense. The keys aren't there. There's a pair of shoes missing from by the door. Something inside Sakura unknots. She leaves her own shoes there and peels her soaked socks off for good measure.

She showers, heating her skin and sloughing off the dirt of the day. She remains under the water longer than what's probably advisable, closing her eyes against the steam and trying to get her thoughts to behave. They race around stupidly, interrupted intermittently by the roar of thunder outside.

Sakura drinks tea at her broad open window, sitting on the ledge and getting her side damp again. The weather is making such a spectacular effort to be terrible that she feels compelled to watch.

It occurs to her then, while lightning flashes brilliantly outside, that maybe the problem Sakura's soul mate has with giving her their name isn't strictly security.

Maybe her soul mate thinks she'll _recognise_ it.

She looks thoughtfully at the pale, pale skin on the inside of her forearm. There are some names that are more famous than others. She's not especially familiar with the names of missin nin because she doesn't have much interest in bounty hunting, but even she can name a few off the top of her head, ones with especially famous stories or high bounties.

She knows of Utakata from Mist - probably a contemporary of Zabuza, she thinks, although she can't remember why they made such an enormous fuss about Utakata's defection when Mist is practically infamous for missing nin anyway. They leak like a sieve, and having listened to Zabuza, she can now guess why. Nobody would want to stay in such a place for long. Then there's Sasori from Sand. Supposedly he's implicated in killing one of the Kazekages. He has a bounty to match. She's definitely heard of _him_.

The only Leaf ninja she can think of off the top of her head is Uchiha Itachi, who...

Well. Pretty much every ninja in the village has heard of Uchiha Itachi. He's a cautionary tale about the quiet ones.

She shouldn't have asked.

'Sorry,' she writes finally. She chooses not to ask again.

Her soul mate, whoever they are, doesn't respond to that - not directly. But she feels, later when she's riffling through her mother's library for genjutsu books (sparse, very sparse, although there is one on breaking genjutsu that Sakura takes to read), the tug of writing on her skin.

'Everything stops during a sandstorm. Nobody goes anywhere. Nobody does anything. Everything gets cancelled. There's no... movement. It's boring.'

It's not even exciting or interesting information. And still, it fills her with a soft thrill.

She's still not sure what to say by way of response. It makes her anxious, thinking of how whatever she says is likely to be received. Will she seem too forward? Too distant? Too young? Banal and stupid?

'Is it that dangerous?' she writes finally, because she's heard that sand storms can be bad - can cause awful abrasions which get infected, can exacerbate respiratory illness, can blind - but that they're pretty survivable if a person is well prepared.

Also that they're good cover, especially if you have somebody with the Byakugan on your team.

'Not with preparation. It's more a matter of tradition than real danger,' writes her soul mate, almost immediately. 'It's poor form to conduct any kind of business in Wind during a sandstorm. So we wait.' A pause, and then the writing smears away, rubbed from the other end with the ball of a thumb. Sakura doesn't feel it. Then it goes on, more precise old-fashioned brush strokes. It's very pretty, but it's not as easy to read as her own plainer script. 'Even the view outside is nothing but sand.'

Sakura isn't sure who 'we' is or what business her soul mate is trying to conduct, and she's not about to ask. She does note that they seem to be a foreigner to Wind country. If she actually had a list of possible missing nin, that would be helpful information. She doesn't.

'You're bored,' she writes instead of pressing for more information.

'Very.'

A jounin-level missing nin would have to be pretty bored, Sakura thinks, to bother themselves with writing to her. She has wild ideas as to what such people get up to in their off-hours, and mostly they're filtered through stereotypes and whispers - drinking, she thinks, or gambling. Terrorising civilians after dark. Five finger fillet in dingy warehouses.

But apparently they also spend off-hours waiting out sandstorms and writing to their much younger soul mates.

She isn't busy, but she has nothing to say or ask that won't require her soul mate give up _some_ personal information. Eventually, tentatively, she writes, 'Would you like to play a game?'

She regrets it almost before she's finished writing, and she expects to be rebuffed.

But she is not, and in the end, they play shiritori until after midnight. It's not quite the same written as it is spoken, but it passes the time. It is lulling and pleasant.

She loses seven games out of nine. Her soul mate is an indifferent winner, but at least they don't seem to mind when Sakura inevitably falls asleep.

Over the days that follow, Sakura discovers that names are not the only thing her soul mate is tight-lipped about. Her desire not to press for information doesn't last very long but her soul mate, she gathers, excels at and revels in being as obstructive as possible.

' _Aging_ ,' she clarifies, annoyed. 'It's the process of physical, psychological and social change that a person undergoes as they _get older.'_ She cannot help the aggressive emphasis in her writing.

She's sitting at a table in the library with the sunlight glinting off lazy dust motes in the air around her, distracted from trying (mostly in vain) to find some useful beginner's resource on genjutsu. The book she took from her mother provides only instruction on defending against genjutsu, not on casting them.

Despite having actual things to do, Sakura finds herself sidetracked whenever her soul mate seems to have the time or patience to answer her. The tug of a brush on the skin of her arm always sets off a reaction in her head - there's something uncannily compelling about it, like scratching an itch.

Intellectually, Sakura knows it's all brain chemistry and the mysterious soul mate bond, but once she feels the writing she cannot be deterred.

'Is this really relevant?' her soul mate writes, and she gets the distinct impression that they are amused by the conversation. Probably they're similarly influenced toward contact with her. It's unavoidable.

'Yes. Typically we measure it in years,' she prompts pointedly.

'Hmm,' responds her soul mate. 'What if the psychological outstrips the physical or social? Or one is halted entirely? How then do we measure?'

And... What? Sakura pauses with her pen hovering above the inside of her forearm. She almost gives in and writes _what the hell_ like she wants to, but after a second she remembers her initial point. 'Still in years,' she writes firmly. 'How many?'

'Lots,' they write, unconcerned.

The discussion about sex and/or possibly gender is even worse, because it takes two hours and twelve minutes to conclude that her soul mate is a man. ... _Probably._

She takes a deep breath. 'How about a birthday?' she asks, although at this point she does not hold out much hope.

'Ah. October 27,' he writes. There's no questions about what calendar they're using or the nature of days or even how to define birth. He just answers, quick and without arguing, and it's so unexpected that Sakura nearly falls off her seat.

Her soul mate enjoys being obnoxious, yes, but she quickly learns that he enjoys _provoking a response_ more.

Sakura learns more about her soul mate, but her attempts to learn more actual ninja skills are less successful in the short term. She doesn't ask Kakashi-sensei again - she thinks if she does he'll make an effort, but she also thinks that no effort will stand up to Naruto and Sasuke. There is, she knows, a genjutsu specialist among the other jounin-sensei - but if her own teacher can't corral his students for long enough to get through a lecture, Sakura suspects Yuuhi Kurenai will be at least as busy with her genin. Especially since her genin includes Kiba, who is, objectively, at least as annoying as Naruto.

What Sakura needs are basic principles, so she returns to the place where she learnt all the other basic principles.

The academy seems strange all these months after she's left it, but there is familiarity and comfort here too. Sakura still knows the schedule. She arrives during lunch, ducks around a tiny kunoichi in training - was she ever that small, herself? - and peers into Iruka-sensei's classroom.

Iruka is at his desk, leafing through the ugly scrawlings left to him by his class. The light from the classroom windows slants across him, warm and golden, gleaming in his dark hair and on his brown skin. Despite his scarred face, Iruka looks very wholesome there.

"Sakura-chan," he says, blinking. Then he smiles, and it is not wary like it might be with Naruto, for all Iruka probably likes him better. Sakura is a good student, a tractable child with a good temper. Both of them know she's not here to stir trouble for its own sake.

"You know," he says when she explains what she's looking for, "I know Kakashi-san isn't necessarily the easiest person to get along with..."

Sakura feels her eyebrows rise. Yes. This she knows.

"...but he is your teacher. Is this something you should come to me with...?"

She simultaneously does and does not want to tell Iruka-sensei that she's already asked and been rebuffed. It might make this easier, but then, her team is full of strong personalities. She's the least resilient of them by far and she knows it. She thinks Iruka probably does too. He put her there, after all.

He must interpret something from her awkward silence, because he leans back in his chair and sighs. The chair creaks. The sounds of academy-age children screaming rises for a second as somebody goes careening past the window. Sakura looks out, alarmed, but Iruka doesn't even twitch.

"I'd like to be able to help you," he admits slowly, "but I don't really have the time. I can recommend some books," he suggests.

Sakura likes books. She's excellent with books. "If you don't mind," she says, feeling very polite. She sort of wants to lunge at him and forcibly extract the knowledge from his brain. Ironically, this would probably require some skill with genjutsu.

"You learn well from books," Iruka says absently, bending toward his desk and fishing a pen out of a cup of them. It's red ink, like the scribbles he leaves on their homework, very bright against the chemically whitened paper he pulls from a notepad for her.

Blood is that colour red, when it's fresh: bright and shocking. She always used to think it was darker, but now she's seen it spilt properly, in huge quantities, and she knows. When the air hits it, blood is bright. It takes time to turn brown.

"Sakura?" Iruka prompts, and she realises she's been staring. The list is finished.

"Thank you," she says automatically, and takes the list from him.

It only has two books on it, but a starting point is a starting point.

"I'm sorry," he says slowly, looking at her with narrowed too-shrewd eyes. Iruka-sensei is a chuunin and a teacher, neither of which is terribly frightening. But he is perceptive. "I wish I had time."

"No," she says, mechanically, folding the paper. In half. In quarters. Eighths. "Thank you."

Sakura leaves before he says anything else.

Iruka-sensei has written 'this one first,' against one of the books on his note, so when Sakura goes to the central library she looks for that one first. She finds it in the shinobi reading archive, and like most of the books there it's not to be removed.

Genjutsu appears only briefly and in overview on the academy curriculum for the same reason that medical techniques in the academy are relegated to first aid - anything else requires precise control and a degree of specialist understanding that the academy just isn't designed to provide.

Sakura knows this when she first cracks open her book, but even looking at the contents page makes her feel a little overwhelmed. _Thalamus and sensory information_ , reads the heading of chapter six. There's an entire chapter labelled ' _Amygdala_ ', which isn't even a word Sakura recognises.

It's... challenging.

She double-checks Iruka-sensei's note to make sure she's reading the right one.

She is. Sakura bites her lip and wonders if maybe she should focus on something simpler. It's tempting to just give up - this seems absurdly involved, and as far as she can tell from the chapter headings, there aren't even preparatory chakra exercises in this book. It's all just dense, painful theory.

 _Shut up,_ growls a clear and angry voice in her head. It's that thing inside her, the stubborn raging thing that peers out from behind her eyes when she talks to her mother, when she holds her tongue instead of screaming. And it's right, as it usually is.

She taps her fingertips on the contents page of the book for a few more seconds, considering.

Then Sakura gets up and fetches a comprehensive dictionary and a book titled _Encyclopaedia of Morphology and Functional Anatomy of the Human Brain_.

In the end Sakura knows Iruka-sensei isn't going to steer her wrong. It's just that, quite unlike most people she knows, he also hasn't underestimated her intelligence. The books he's suggested are hard, frustrating ones, and there's a reason for that - genjutsu is a hard, frustrating thing to study. It's little wonder they don't teach it at the academy.

From the books Sakura learns that there are several ways of casting genjutsu: the broadest is a method in which a user casts chakra like a finely-woven veil over a geographical area and waits for a target to step into it and the narrowest is one cast upon one person like the prick of a needle sliding under the skin. There are several in between, and each has its own complexities, advantages and disadvantages.

But from the moment she understands how genjutsu really work, Sakura starts to feel a little overwhelmed.

It sounds straightforward when she explains it to someone like Naruto as 'other people put their chakra in you to make you see and feel things that aren't there', but the actual practice of doing that is...

The thing is this: Sakura is confident that she could easily cause hallucinations in somebody, but she has no idea how to direct them. Meaningless, wild hallucinations are something any ninja would notice immediately, and the point of genjutsu as an art is primarily in its subtlety. Getting her own chakra into somebody else's body is something that has to be done without them noticing in the moment, or else it will never succeed.

Sakura's chakra control is good enough that she could cast a genjutsu by at least two of the methods discussed in her text, but the idea of interfering with somebody's senses in such a specific way as to promote precisely the illusion she wants is...

Sakura rubs her hands through her hair and stares blankly at the wall for a good minute trying to figure out how anybody ever casts genjutsu successfully. What is the precise _way_ to stimulate somebody's brain to make them see a thing they're afraid of? To simulate pain or nausea? To change a memory?

Ninjutsu suddenly seems a lot easier, and Sakura has never excelled in that area. She can barely jutsu up a campfire at need. She's suddenly not surprised that Kakashi viewed this as something unlikely to benefit the whole team. Naruto, for all his pigheaded determination, is _never_ going to be any good at any part of this. With very good luck and practice, he may be able to break an illusion.

The second book is just as hard and disheartening as the first. It requires a more in-depth understanding of anatomy - specifically of the brain, but also of the rest of the nervous and chakra systems - than Sakura really has. She has to go back to basics and learn her anatomy first, building on what she knows from the Academy curriculum, and even then she struggles with the book itself.

It takes her much longer to work her way through than she'd expected. She finishes her books in days, but it's only over the course of weeks that she really begins to understand the concepts involved.

While genjutsu is a very broad school of knowledge, nobody starts out creating their own techniques. There are several well-known genjutsu - things like the easiest of the Demonic Illusion bunch - that are discrete and can be applied fairly indiscriminately. They're devastating if used properly, and more advanced practitioners can twist them in different ways to make them less predictable. They're also something Sakura can't really learn from a book.

She can swallow up all the theory, but putting it into practice is never going to be perfect unless she has time to try it out first.

There's not a lot of people around she can practice with.

Kakashi and Sasuke are right out, because they can see right through anything she might do. Mebuki is a disaster waiting to happen. Naruto is... well, Naruto.

She considers, briefly, asking Ino - but Ino has her own team, for one, and for another... Sakura isn't really sure how comfortable she is practising with Ino. She knows she'll fail a lot before she gets it right, and she doesn't like it when Ino knows she's bad at something. She always has the nagging feeling that it might end up used against her.

She puts the problem on the backburner.

Over time, Sakura's notes pile up.

Emotional states are the easiest to impact for any human. Almost nobody is immune to the effect of sufficient killing intent, for example, which operates roughly in the same way as genjutsu: a ninja's chakra makes its way into the victim's system. Most of the time the victim will notice immediately, since it's not exactly subtle, and this will create a surge of adrenalin and trigger the fight or flight reflex. Depending on the strength of the chakra, the victim will respond by running or fighting - or, if the chakra is sufficiently overwhelming, by freezing.

Sakura figures this is pretty straightforward - anxiety is the easiest emotion to trigger in another person. All attacks cause anxiety. Only training makes most ninja remain calm under attack.

The other "easy" - for a certain value of easiness - feeling is anger or an urge toward violence. It's as simple as tapping into that same fight or flight reflex and nudging a person toward _fight_.

In her reading, Sakura comes across one nasty but straightforward - for a certain value of straightforwardness - illusion that does exactly that, but then also interferes with visual perception to such an extent that the victim is likely to begin attacking blind. It doesn't have a fancy name - it's just the chicken-scratch scrawl of some previous library-goer left smudged beneath the end point of a chapter, labelled 'make someone attack nearest target'. A note in a different hand right in the margin reads: _useful for large groups; remain hidden and use against any target with wide-area attack specialty if possible_.

It's an easy illusion. Sakura looks at it carefully, but it doesn't require as much specificity as advanced ones. It's easier, even, than the Hell Viewing Technique. It affects one target, and requires that the caster simultaneously cause panic - easy enough - and interfere with the person's visual perception. With practice, this is something Sakura is pretty sure she can learn. Affecting sensory perception is more difficult than just making somebody anxious, but...

It takes her weeks to really understand what she's studying, but once she does, Sakura breaks the theory down into its component parts and... Yeah. She can do this.

She first tries to practice on a squirrel she finds out in the forest. It has no natural defences against her chakra like a ninja might, and she kills it accidentally before she realises she's going to need human subjects. Even if Sakura could moderate her chakra enough to panic a squirrel without killing it, it is never going to experience the same sensory perception as a human.

While Sakura studies, boring D-ranked missions continue as usual, and her team is just as tense and uncommunicative as it has been for weeks. It annoys and unsettles Sakura, but she knows there isn't really anything she can do about it. For all that Naruto supposedly likes her and Sasuke is supposed to recognise that she's the smartest in their graduating class, neither of them would listen to her.

She thinks both would listen to Kakashi, but Kakashi won't broach it. Maybe it's some kind of test they're all failing, something about asking comrades for help or... teamwork or something.

All of that just means that Sakura's starting to feel like her real training takes place only in the library. She returns to the big, dusty, paper-scented building for the hours between the end of their usual D-ranks and nightfall, which is when she begins to make her way home to make sure there's groceries and dinner and the bills have all been paid and the washing has been taken out of the machine and hung out instead of just left there to moulder. Mebuki is good at all of these things sometimes and terrible at them others, and Sakura isn't really good at knowing which times are which.

Sakura rarely sees Mebuki anyway, and when she does it is most often at Kizashi's shrine. She toys, briefly, with asking her for tips or direction, but - Mebuki will take it as an open invitation to tell Sakura what she's doing wrong in so many different ways. It's stupid, since she never pays enough attention to know what Sakura's doing at all, let alone what she's doing right or wrong. Sakura feels best-served by ignoring her.

It's not the first time she wishes Kizashi was still with them, but it's one of the moments in which she feels the loss most keenly. She is twelve, a genin, a legal adult; she needs direction or encouragement and she finds it virtually impossible to source.

As soon as Sakura starts thinking about him Kizashi seems impossible to ignore. He's the heavy presence in every room, gone but never forgotten. She wouldn't forget him, of course, but she resents that her mother will never, ever allow her to.

She remembers him carefully combing his hair into that stupid star shape, grinning goofily at his reflection all the while. She remembers his light voice and easy temper and how he never seemed to know where his socks were. She remembers how he checked his hand for writing every time they went to get groceries.

Some days her whole house smells like incense. Mebuki haunts the shrine.

Sakura goes to the cenotaph instead.

The first time it's in a daze, frustrated and missing him powerfully and a little bit resentful. She crouches down before the big dark stone and touches his name. The rock's cold, even in the sunlight.

Sakura is startled by the names that are carved there. There are more than she expects, name after name coming right on the heels of her own father's. So many ninja killed in action. They, too, were probably each someone's soul mate.

She rubs the inside of her arm thoughtfully and wonders what Kizashi would say about hers.

Probably only that she's lucky it isn't on her butt.

She misses him.

Sakura makes a habit of visiting the cenotaph. She brings flowers, tangerines - once, three paper cranes she folded while babysitting a village elder's grandson. She's not the only one who leaves little offerings, biodegradable and brightly coloured, around the foot of the memorial.

It's not a family shrine, but most ninja aren't religious. If they believe in spirits or gods... well. The only god Sakura believes in for sure is the god of death, primarily because everybody knows he can be summoned. She thinks most ninja are like her. It's easier to believe in what you can prove.

Sakura likes getting flowers for her dad, and she doesn't mind leaving them at the cenotaph. Sometimes she picks them for herself, out of the ones that grow wild around Konoha. It gives her the opportunity to feel like she's using the skills she learnt in kunoichi classes, at least. But sometimes she does buy them. It's what she'd do for a hospitalised or grieving friend. It feels more respectful that way.

Besides, the Yamanaka flower shop is comforting in its familiarity. There's something soothing about it, from the cool air to the smell of living things and dirt.

There's a bell that tinkles above her head when she crosses the threshold into the shop. The interior is dim, the air damp and heavy. All around her are green leaves, glossy and dark, punctuated with surprising sprays and splashes of colour. It smells good.

"Ah... Sakura-chan. Ino's not here," Inoichi tells her when he peers around the doorway to the store room. He pauses. His eyes have no discernable pupil but she thinks they narrow, picking out something in her manner or expression that Sakura can't hide. "Or did you want flowers?"

"Flowers," she admits.

"Purple, huh?" Inoichi says, completely without that particular forced cheer people get when discussing the dead. He has a good graveside manner, although given that his family runs a flower shop in a ninja village Sakura supposes this is to be expected.

Kizashi's favourite colours were bright pink and purple. Neither ever matched his hair. Sakura does get purple flowers, in all sorts of sizes and from weird little statice sprays to huge full carnations.

Inoichi emerges from the back room entirely, wiping his fingers on a rag, and helps her with the flowers. He ties them deftly with twine and wraps their stems to keep them damp.

"It's good to remember," he says, "but next time come to see Ino, too."

Sakura blinks.

That's... direct.

He's right, though, she thinks, trying to remember when the last time she caught up with Ino was. "I'm sorry," she says automatically, fumbling with her wallet. "I've been busy."

"I heard about that a few weeks back," he says, tilting his head. The absurd spikes on top stay the same, but the long tail of his hair swings when he moves his head. "People's first C-rank missions have a way of going badly, but not usually _that_ badly."

It takes her a second to catch on, and then she shakes her head. "It's not that - well, no, that was - yes. That was bad, but -"

Sakura pauses, because the thought has occurred to her that she doesn't really have anyone to ask, but Inochi-san is standing right here, talking to her now. She puts her wallet down on the bench between them, frowning.

"Sakura-chan?" he prompts.

"I'm having trouble," she admits slowly. "In the academy, everybody said I was a genjutsu type. I've looked for more information, but nobody seems to... well. There's nobody to practice with, and I don't know... I don't suppose you know anybody who can just - even just show me where to start?" Her voice trails off hesitantly, young and girlish and uncertain, and she sort of hates it even though it perfectly expresses how she feels about asking. It's not in Sakura's nature to be so direct - when she has those urges, she crushes them and smiles. This feels rude and presumptuous.

Inoichi leans onto the bench and looks at her speculatively for a long moment. He is quiet for long enough that Sakura can feel her insides begin to cringe.

"It's not a popular field of study in Konoha," he admits. "Until a few years ago, there was an entire clan of genjutsu-users who were better equipped for it than any but the very best masters - and they rarely even needed training. As a village our skills in genjutsu have atrophied. Yuuhi Kurenai is the only true specialist in the village right now."

Sakura knows who that is, and she also knows that anybody put in charge of Inuzuka Kiba has her hands full. Her stomach sinks a little. She wanted -

Well, maybe it doesn't matter what she wanted.

Inoichi checks the clock hung on his wall. "Come on," he says then. "I have two hours before I have to go in to work. Genjutsu isn't my specialty but I can start you off with the basics."

He unties his apron at the back of his waist and tugs it off over his head, then leaves it draped across the bench next to the ancient cash register.

"Leave it," he instructs, nodding toward the wrapped stems of her bouquet. The flowers will keep for more than a few hours. She leaves them on the bench.

They don't even leave the building. Inoichi just draws her away from the front of the shop and into one of the store rooms out the back. There's a doorway to the Yamanakas' backyard out here, cracked open and spilling sunlight across the concrete floor. She can see the edge of the glass house through the doorway.

Inoichi offers her a seat on a huge ceramic pot that's been left upside down, and Sakura perches there, trying not to fidget or twitch too much. She feels nervous - not the pulse-pounding, heart-in-her-throat anxiety of a fight, but a sort of lingering queasiness that nags at her. There's a lot of other things Inoichi could be doing with this time and she knows it.

"I'm sorry to say I don't have a lot of time to help you," he says, which marries so well with her thoughts that she startles a little. "But I'll help you get started. What do you already know?"

Sakura launches into an explanation much more in-depth than the one she provided for Naruto a few weeks ago. She explains what she's been making notes on, cites the books to which Iruka-sensei pointed her and details her brief but determined forays into brain structures.

"You have a theoretical grounding for the basics," he decides after listening to her. "Genjutsu, like ninjutsu, are usually taught on a case by case basis to beginners. You've already come across the one I'm going to show you here - the false surroundings technique. I'm picking this one for three reasons: one, it's easier to learn than most genjutsu; two, it's benign and I don't mind it being tested on me; three, I've taught it before and I'm familiar with it. We use it sometimes in our division, particularly in field interrogations. It's also flexible - it has a lot of different applications and you can layer two or more sets of false surroundings on top of each other, so that if one is noticed and broken the illusions below are still safe."

Then, flicking a blond spike of hair away from his face, Inoichi launches into a rapid rundown of the requirements for the technique. Sakura nods and wishes she'd brought something to take notes with.

Interfering with perceptions is supposed to be quite a lot harder than just prodding at people's feelings. Sakura isn't entirely sure she can do it, but Inoichi seems to think it's worth his time to show her how.

"For most humans, it's easiest to interfere with visual and tactile perception, closely followed by auditory. These are most developed in humans, and there's both larger bodily systems dedicated to them and lot more complexity in those systems for processing the information. They make larger targets, and greater complexity means more opportunities to make something go wrong, which is basically what you're doing. For the false surroundings technique, we mostly focus on visual and auditory stimuli. As with most genjutsu, it's easiest to provide guidelines and let a target's brain fill in the details. It's both less taxing on you and less likely to be recognised as a genjutsu by your target."

Inoichi doesn't talk to Sakura like he's trying to instruct his daughter's friend or a newly-qualified genin. He talks to her like he expects her to keep up with everything he's saying. His lecture is brief but focused, and after about fifteen minutes of talking, he finishes with:

"...if you can distract somebody while you're laying a genjutsu like this it's ideal. For example, you're currently under the impression that you're in the back storeroom, sitting on a pot."

Sakura jerks and blinks at him with wide eyes. What-? All this time-?

Inoichi grins.

Sakura's first instinct is to flare her chakra and break the technique. She feels the urge and nearly gives in to it, but after a second she reminds herself that she's pretty much safe here. Inoichi is a person she knows well. He took care of her as a tiny child and if he didn't murder her out of sheer frustration then he is unlikely to hurt her now.

She lowers her hands from the seal they made reflexively and instead tries to feel out what's actually happening. She's no sensor, but her chakra control is fine enough that she should be able to feel Inoichi's chakra interfering with her own.

It's... harder than she thinks it should be. He has a light touch. Awkwardly, she touches the pot she's seated on, trying to figure out what it actually is. Hopefully not something disgusting.

Her fingers touch cool ceramic. No clues there. She closes her eyes.

With her eyes shut, it becomes a little easier to focus on her internal feelings. The chakra threading through hers is so faint it's undetectable - which is, she assumes, sort of the point. She can't really trace it once it sinks into her own chakra circulatory system, matching the ebb and flow of her own chakra effortlessly.

She thinks about the things Inoichi is probably affecting with it. Vision and somatosensation, obviously. Maybe proprioception or equilibrioception, in small ways, too. She wonders if that means his chakra is doing something to her inner ear.

"I won't actually know everything about what you're seeing," Inoichi says cheerfully. "You've got guidelines - I know you're sitting on a ceramic pot, but I don't know what colour or shape you've decided it is. I can tell you we're in the store room, but I didn't really pay much attention to what you think I've got stored in here. There's no dead bodies, right?"

"No," she agrees, smiling. "No dead bodies." She peers at the things in the room, wondering. She can certainly see some things she knows Inoichi would have in here - a watering can with several different head shapes for differing water pressure and dispersal, a long length of hose, several pots and bags of fertiliser. There's also an old metal rake she thinks might actually belong in the much-neglected shed behind her own house, and a pair of boots that, with a pang, she realises might actually be Kizashi's.

"You can break it now," Inoichi suggests.

Sakura raises her chakra output sharply, letting it flare beneath her skin. The bits Inoichi has woven into her circulatory system stand out immediately when they fail to adapt, and the illusion falls away as her body automatically recognises and rejects them. It's easy.

Sakura's sitting on a rough wooden bench in the back yard. Inoichi is leaning, not against the wall of the store room like she initially supposed, but against the side of his sturdy glass house. She looks over her shoulder. The store room is there, behind the shop, but it isn't the door they walked through.

For a moment she's disoriented thinking about it. Breaking free is one thing, but contemplating how Inoichi must have led her back here and when he slipped his chakra into hers is a more confusing question.

"Very neat. You have excellent chakra control." He smiles. "Your turn."

Sakura smiles right back. She does have good chakra control. Iruka-sensei said so, and now Inoichi - and, hell, even Kakashi, absurd and laconic as he is, has told her that hers is above average.

She takes her turn, but she doesn't get it right the first time - or the second, or the third. Her efforts eat up the time Inoich has kindly offered her. When he has to go in to work - "To my real job," he says humorously, as though what he does in the flower shop isn't proper work, and where does he even find this much energy? - she still hasn't mastered it.

"Practice," he advises. "You're close. I'm sorry I won't be available to help. Konoha's in for a busy few months soon," he adds, frowning a little.

"Thank you," says Sakura, because it is polite. She is thankful, of course, but she's also hungry and resentful. She wants more than she's given, and probably more than she has a right to.

Inoichi looks at Sakura like he can see the person inside her, angry and plaintive and shameless. She's sure it doesn't show through her polite smile, but he pays too much attention. Ino's like that, too; too perceptive by half when it comes to other people.

He hands her flowers over. There's an iris in the middle now, and she doesn't remember picking it.

Sakura leaves them at the cenotaph like she planned, but she's distracted from thoughts of her father. She thinks instead about chakra circulation and psychology.

Inoichi, true to his word, is very busy for the next week. The flower shop is closed more often than not, and when Sakura does catch a glimpse of him, it's usually in the corridors near the mission office. Once, when she's lagging behind her team mates, particularly bedraggled from a mission, he pauses to flick a damp string of hair out of her face and smile good-naturedly down at her.

"It's because of the exam," Ino tells her when Sakura finally makes good on her promise to Inoichi and tracks her friend down. Sakura spends so much time with Naruto and Sasuke it's hard to tell if she has any actual friends sometimes. It's good to see Ino.

It's afternoon, after her stupid mission of the day - this one involving the escape of a prize carp from a nobleman's collection. In the end the stupid thing turned out to have been poisoned by an equally vapid social rival. Sakura thinks the only person surprised by that was Naruto.

"Exam?" Sakura frowns.

Ino's eyebrows rise right up. "Uh, yeah? The chuunin exam? You didn't know?"

Sakura shakes her head.

"Huh, you really have been distracted."

This makes it a lot clearer, the following afternoon, why there are three kids from Sand in the village. It doesn't make it much clearer why they're terrorising a tiny child, though.

The biggest of them has a baggy black bodysuit and a painted face. His sister's not much smaller, although she looks less like some kind of melodramatic screenplay ninja and more like a normal human being. Even if they didn't have Sand plates on their forehead protectors, Sakura thinks she'd know they aren't from around here. There's something wary about the way they look around, something stiff and nervous in their bodies.

Sakura knows Konohamaru only vaguely. She knows he's Sarutobi-sama's grandson, and that he's sort of a brat. She's seen him and Naruto fooling around. Anybody but _Naruto_ , and she'd find it sweet how much time and attention he's willing to lavish on the child - he's a lot more patient than Sakura thinks she would be in his place.

But even if Konohamaru is the brattiest child ever to live, it doesn't mean Sand ninja can just come here and pick on him.

Naruto interrupts with yelling and accusations, as is his way.

"Can I see your passports?" Sakura asks politely, stepping around him to address the girl - mostly because she's the one _not_ dressed in a onesie with cat ears, which ranks her as probably the most reasonable in Sakura's view. She's got blonde hair, not like Ino or Naruto, but a soft sandy colour that Sakura hasn't seen before. She's taller than Sakura, and there's a wiriness to her arms and a broadness to her shoulders that Sakura thinks might be from a lot of weapons training.

Sakura's not quite sure how she'll enforce her demand should they tell her no.

The girl's brow furrows and her green eyes narrow at Sakura and it looks, for a second, like they will. _Stupid_ , thinks Sakura, wondering why she doesn't already have a plan if she's so determined to interfere, but -

With a _crack_ a stone connects with the hand of the boy, and he flinches back and drops Konohamaru. Sakura knows without looking that Sasuke is where it came from, although her eyes follow the probable arc of the rock anyway.

The redhead is a surprise. He's obviously younger, but his siblings freeze like frightened bunnies when he snaps at them.

Naruto's response to him is also a surprise. He doesn't say anything at all, which is strange enough, but he goes just as still as the siblings and he can't seem to tear his eyes away from the other kid.

In the end, Sakura has to drag his attention away - even after the three of them leave peacefully, Naruto is still staring after them with a clenched jaw and a strange flinching tightness around his eyes.

"They must be here for the exam," she says inanely.

"Eh? Sakura-chan, what exam?"

"Don't you even know that?" Sakura snaps.

She didn't know until yesterday either, but it's a knee-jerk response to Naruto. She can't help herself. It's like she's so conditioned to find him annoying that every time he opens his mouth she's irritated before he even gets a full sentence out.

On the other hand, she can't help but think Naruto could fix this problem by being less irritating.

And yet.

"Ne, ne, Sakura-chan -"

She knows she brought this on herself. She grinds her teeth and answers him.

"The chuunin exam is being held in Konoha soon," she explains, even as Sasuke joins them in a flicker of movement and chakra. He shoves his hands in his pockets and doesn't quite fall into step. He's so composed about it. Very cool. Sakura's eyes drift to him automatically and don't want to leave. "It's an exam for advancing to a new shinobi rank."

She goes on to point out that there's very little chance they'll need to worry about it, but she's rapidly proven wrong when the very next day Kakashi cheerfully informs them they've been nominated.

Naruto and Sasuke both seem to find this completely reasonable. Expected, even.

Sakura is... less certain. They haven't even been genin that long. She doesn't feel like she's learnt very much between the academy's graduation exam and now.

"Maa... well," says Kakashi, once she gingerly accepts the form that says she's been nominated by her jounin-sensei. She doesn't say anything about her mixed feelings so presumably he's reading her expression. "You don't have to take the exam."

She gets the distinct impression that he disapproves of this option, even though she can't see his face and he doesn't actually say anything to that effect.

Perhaps in some other world, Sakura doesn't have to take the exam. Perhaps there she does the sensible thing and admits she's not going to be a chuunin just yet, and that she doesn't want to undertake a long, hard, dangerous exam just to prove what she already knows.

But here and now she looks from Sasuke to Naruto and back again. Sasuke's expression is closed, but she's made a study of him and now she can read his feelings in the eyes and eyebrows - in this case, it's all disdain. Sakura wants to shrink in on herself and crumple under the weight of his judging regard, but she knows better. She tries to straighten instead.

"Let's try our best, ne, Sasuke-kun?" she says cheerfully instead.

He grunts and looks away, which is about what she expects. One day, Sakura, she tells herself. One day.

"That's exactly the kind of attitude I expect from the girl I have high hopes for," Naruto says, planting his hands on his hips and nodding.

Sakura balls her hand into a fist but neither looks at him nor punches him across the village like she wants to.

Kakashi looks up at the sun, tells them he's 'a bit overdue' for a meeting with Hokage-sama, and disappears in a puff of smoke. Sakura dreads to think how frightfully late that means he actually is, and decides not to question it too much.

The chuunin exam is a terrifying motivator, and it's starting next week. Sakura bites her lower lip. There's only so much improvement she can make in a week - there's no time to really improve her conditioning (which does, after all, require conditioning), and there's absolutely no way she's going to pick up an entirely new skill set. It's best, she thinks, to work on what she's already working on - she's pretty sure that with some practice she'll be able to get at least the false surroundings technique working by then.

She runs her hands through her hair, and then realises that she's messed it up and revealed yet more of her enormous forehead, and that Sasuke can still see her. Damn. "Sasuke-kun," she says, both to distract him and because she does want to ask. "If we've got a big exam coming up, we should train together, shouldn't we?"

She feels sort of forward asking, but there's really nothing inappropriate about team mates training together. It's not just expected, it's encouraged. And -

"For me," he says coolly, "training with somebody like you... there's no point."

"Oh," she says. She bites her lower lip.

"I'll train with you," Naruto says brightly.

"I'd rather not," she says flatly.

"Oh," he says. She can almost hear him deflate. She teeters on the edge of guilt, but then she remembers how annoying Naruto is.

They stand in silence for a few moments, but eventually Sasuke leaves - and since Sakura doesn't want to spend any of her time alone with Naruto, she leaves too.

As much as she should congratulate herself for getting out of spending any undue amount of time with Naruto, this still leaves Sakura with nobody upon whom to practice her technique - and, honestly nobody to ask about genjutsu in general. Yes, the books have answers, but they only have _some_ answers, and only if she knows where to look.

Sakura feels like she doesn't even know enough to ask the right questions yet, let alone find the right answers.

She decides against telling Mebuki about the chuunin exams. She knows she ought to, but she can't help but remember when she tried telling her mother about her first C rank mission...

So in the end Sakura leaves her shoes by the door, slips past the entryway to the incense-scented living room, and heads upstairs to her bedroom without confronting her.

Telling Mebuki will not be comfortable. It will not be particularly meaningful either, and, most damning of all, it won't even be helpful.

She consoles herself that Mebuki would probably prefer not to be distracted by such a conversation anyway.

It's three in the morning when Sakura wakes up, tired but wide-eyed in the dark. She is humming suddenly with tension. There's an exam coming up, and an exam for ninja means danger. Probably, she thinks, she'll have to fight. And her team... she's not entirely sure she can rely on them to keep her safe.

This thought is beneath her, really, and it shames her a little to think of it like that. They kept each other safe all the way through that long and terrible mission to Wave, didn't they? But a lot of that was luck, and the rest was a blend of Haku's gentle character and circumstance.

The thought occurs to her that her team probably can't rely on her, either. She's busy watching their backs, screaming silently while they leave her behind. She can barely help herself.

She stares at nothing for a few long moments. It's dark in her room, just a sliver of moonlight between her curtains that splashes across the roof. Somewhere a clock is ticking and she can't help but ascribe more meaning to the sound than it truly represents. Time, she is horribly aware, is moving implacably forward.

There's nothing for it.

She needs help.

For an hour, Sakura wracks her brain, trying to think of people who know anything about anything and whom she's actually capable of approaching.

At the end of the hour, with a strange sour feeling in her gut, she rolls over and turns on a lamp. She rummages for a pen.

He's a jounin-class ninja, isn't he? He must know something. More than her, surely. Whether or not he's awake, he'll see her writing when he looks, so -

'Do you know anything about genjutsu?' she writes, scribbling and sharp around the edges. Sakura's fingers are clumsy with the vestiges of sleep, but its legible enough.

'I have a passing familiarity with the discipline,' replies her soul mate. He writes in slow, precise strokes.

And Sakura is so pleased she doesn't even think to wonder what he's doing up at four in the morning. Anxiety has been gnawing at her and she feels like she's on the edge of fixing her problem.

'Genin usually have teachers of their own,' her soul mate writes.

'I do,' she writes instead, 'but he's busy.'

'The job of a jounin-sensei is to teach,' he points out.

She then tries her best to explain precisely why he's busy even as she avoids mentioning anything of substance about Kakashi or either of her team mates. Sakura isn't quite far gone enough to reveal who her teacher is. Kakashi's name is too well known outside Konoha. And she's pretty sure it would be a terrible idea to mention Sasuke. She hadn't realised his clan was famous until she ran into Zabuza and Haku, but she knows now.

She explains, as non-specifically as possible, the impossible tension in her team, how hard it is to corral them all into doing anything at the same time - especially with Naruto being such a moron, and Sasuke being so far ahead of them all, although this she doesn't detail explicitly - and tries to put into words Kakashi's strange methodology of setting them problems and then sitting back to let them figure out what they need to do on their own.

'Your jounin-sensei is an incompetent teacher,' he tells her. It's strange to see it so stark on her own skin.

'I think he's a better ninja than teacher,' Sakura admits after a long, hesitant pause.

'He's still alive, so he must be,' he writes back acidly.

The prospect of her and her team mates fighting A-ranked missing nin on their first mission outside the village doesn't seem to faze him in the slightest - he is manifestly not even a _little bit_ risk averse, and seems to view lethal danger as a sort of boringly mundane scenery, the same way Sakura might view a rock in the road. But the idea that Kakashi-sensei might not have taught them anything at all beforehand annoys him in some strange way she doesn't quite gasp.

'Throwing children into life-or-death situations and watching them struggle is interesting... sometimes even necessary...' he writes blithely, which is not really a sentiment Sakura completely agrees with, 'but there's no point testing children if the teacher hasn't changed them.'

That's... well.

In general he seems to take a very dim view indeed of her teacher. This offends Sakura on Kakashi-sensei's behalf and flatters her on her own all at once. She feels wrong-footed and flustered, and isn't quite sure what to write.

'I'm sorry to bother you,' she writes finally. 'But if you know anything about casting genjutsu,' and here she trails off, hesitating to ask directly. It's just - it's rude, she feels. But then she's not going to get any help otherwise. 'Can you help me?'

At another time, Sakura will be embarrassed by her forwardness, but now she is alight with anxiety and sleeplessness, and also just a touch of resentment.

'If I was bothered, you would know,' he says, and there's a flat finality to the comment that she doesn't dare question. She's been trying to avoid thinking of him as something dangerous, but she's abruptly reminded that her soul mate is a missing nin. Just existing for him is necessarily dangerous. 'What question do you have?'

A lot of questions, as it turns out. She starts with what must be a relatively common question: 'How do you account for differing chakra output in your target?' But he answers with pinpoint clarity and no hesitation, so she dives shamelessly in, scrawling madly each question almost as soon as he answers the one before. They feed into each other, and before dawn she finds herself asking things like 'but how do you bypass the sympathetic nervous system to induce sleep instead of panic when the body subconsciously reacts to the introduction of alien chakra? and 'does genjutsu have to adapt to other mind altering substances if you poison somebody?'

Her soul mates's "passing familiarity" turns out to be more than equal to answering most of her questions, and in places where she asks new ones he has theories - he leaps from basic principles to sensible, clever hypotheses without pausing for breath. He is very clever, she thinks, but he enjoys provoking her - teasing out emotional responses, usually ones that either hurt to think about or just make her tired and confused.

She thinks he must have some background in biology - maybe a medic-nin? - because he references organic chemistry, minute details of the chakra circulatory system and psychiatric drugs without seeming to notice that he's not really operating within the bounds of common knowledge anymore.

Sakura pulls her notes from out of her bag and begins making a list of things to look up. More anatomy - always more anatomy - but now also all sorts of hormones, chakra reactions, drugs, psychology.

'I don't see why you can't practice,' he admits, when the pinkish fingers of dawn are stretching over the horizon outside. 'The false surroundings technique is hardly violent - and a civilian need not even know you were there.'

Using unknowing civilians for practice seems... like a bad idea? It seems to Sakura that it wouldn't be a good idea to experiment on people without their knowing about it, because then they can't really agree to it.

This line of argument leads them into a complicated and confusing discussion about agency and how much autonomy anybody really has, especially in a village that exists under military rule like Konoha - technically - does.

Her soul mate knows an awful lot about the laws and codes of several different hidden villages, including but not limited to Konoha and Suna. It strikes her as odd, because hidden villages are, well, _hidden_. She decides against asking about it. If he won't tell her his name, he probably won't tell her where he's from originally, either.

Sakura is forced to admit that, no, ultimately, nobody has _that_ much freedom to determine their own actions in Konoha. Or anywhere else, really.

And when he pushes her further, he demands evidence of harm - which she doesn't have, because of course he's quite right. She doesn't have to hurt anybody to use the false surroundings technique. What difference does it make to a civilian if they walk an extra loop around the block, or sidestep an obstacle that isn't there? None, obviously.

Sakura is swayed to his view - and not least because his view neatly solves the problem of her lack of practice partners.

'Well,' she writes eventually, and now it really is morning, the sun is rising ever higher and she's got to get up and leave to meet with her team soon. 'I could try.'

'Practice makes perfect,' he writes serenely, and that's true, too.

It's almost too easy to execute. Sakura attends her missions and what might be reasonably called training - at which Kakashi is mostly absent and her team mates are too consumed by loathing for one another to be remotely useful - but when they're done she doesn't go home.

Instead she perches herself upon a rooftop and looks over the far edge of the market place as the stall holders return home for the evening. The daylight lingers, lighting up the sky a brilliant gold in the west and streaming grotesquely elongated shadows across the hard-packed dirt paths.

The first two attempts are failures, just as she had with Inoichi, but after that it turns out to be absurdly easy to slip her chakra in beneath a civilian's. Civilians have less chakra in general, but that just means she needs better control, which can only help her in the long run.

Sakura goes out of her way to make the illusions benign, but she knows she's succeeded when her target - a weary baker who clearly needs to go home and get some sleep - frowns and steps around the maintenance works he sees going on in the middle of the street. The street, of course, is wholly empty.

"Yosh!" she whispers to herself, and does a small, victorious fist-pump.

It isn't a fluke, either. Sakura tests her technique, over and over, until she's feeling a little guilty about making a young kid trip over a rock that doesn't exist and the sky is dark.

When she returns home she reports back to her soul mate. It takes him hours to respond, and she reminds herself over and over that he's probably not bored or irritated, he's just busy.

'It's a simple technique,' he tells her when he does answer.

He finds her delight in success at best bemusing, but there's really nobody else for Sakura to tell. Who would she share this with? Kakashi? _Mebuki?_

Ino, maybe, she could share this with, but Ino is on a courier mission to the capital and won't be back for another two days anyway.

She thinks, briefly, that she could probably tell Iruka-sensei, who has after all pointed her toward very useful resources to help her learn this exact thing. But she knows for certain he'd be humouring her, just like Kakashi would be, and -

-Well. Even if her soul mate feels the same way, it's sort of nice not to know it for sure.

Sakura isn't quite sure how to explain that she's never had a technique of her own before. She's seen Sasuke breathe fire, seen Ino open her eyes in another person's body, seen Naruto burst into hundreds of clones on the spot, seen Zabuza disappear into an ominous mist, seen Kakashi hold glittering lightning in the palm of his hand until the air screams around it, seen Haku melt into a mirror of solid ice-

'It's something _I_ can do,' she writes, but she is sure this doesn't convey the nuance she really intends.

'Ah,' he says anyway, as though he understands. Maybe he even does. He is her soul mate, after all. Maybe that ensures some understanding. Or maybe he just doesn't want to know, but wants her to stop writing about it.

In the end, she believes he must understand _something_ , because she practices and practices and when he comes to her the next night it's with oddly quick writing, less elegant and spikier than usual. There's a strange, ominous glee in the characters when he writes: 'The exam will be dangerous. It's a good thing, to test genin and see if they break. And people are always more exciting in motion.'

Sakura isn't sure what to write in response to that. The facts are correct: people are objectively more exciting when they're doing something, and the exam certainly will be dangerous, and it probably is a good thing to test genin. Put all together and arranged the way he's written it out, though, there's a sort of wild frenzied pleasure in the potential for disaster.

Luckily he doesn't seem to require an answer in this case. A second later the characters disappear in the smear of a thumb that she cannot feel.

The writing begins anew.

'But I've got something for you,' he writes, 'to level the playing field. That will make it more interesting, too. And it would be a shame if you died, wouldn't it?'

It's hard to be wary of a soul mate. That very brain chemistry that's used to build an illusion is at work in much the same way when writing to a soul mate. That Sakura even has these momentary spikes of wariness, of anxiety and uncertainty, about her own soul mate is something of a red flag.

His concern for her still strikes her as sweet. Even though it is, largely, also concern for himself - losing a soul mate is a very bad business, after all. One look around her proves that. (She has the fleeting thought that she should make sure Mebuki has eaten, and then she shakes it off. If she's hungry, Mebuki will eat.)

Sakura's soul mate doesn't give her a knife or armour or a new set of explosive seals, or anything as benign and mundane as that.

He gives her a technique.

'A genjutsu that interferes with the cerebellum,' he writes in bold black lines on her skin.

The technique is an... odd one. Conventional wisdom regarding genjutsu says that it's a careful, insidious thing. Visual hallucinations that blend with the existing environment, spikes of terror and anxiety, confused whispering doubts, a sudden bout of sleepiness during the early morning watch - all the strength is in its subtlety, and once noticed an illusion is easily broken and virtually worthless.

Most genjutsu, designed to affect humans as they generally are, have strong visual components. Sight is complicated, too, with parts of the brain dedicated almost solely to processing visual information and presenting it meaningfully, and huge chunks of grey matter dedicated to analysing and assessing what gets presented - so small, or even large, changes can be injected without notice among all that chaos. Following sight, tactile and auditory genjutsu are the most popular - smells and tastes can be insidious and subtle, but they don't have a great many combat applications. They're primarily used, as far as Sakura is aware, for conditioning purposes in T&I.

'The cerebellum is a better-protected part of the brain,' cautions her soul mate.

The chakra circulatory system is less saturated in that area, so Sakura surmises it will require a very delicate application of chakra to go unnoticed - and balance, as a sense, is much less convoluted and complicated than sight.

There's a good chance this genjutsu will be detected quickly, which goes against much of the conventional wisdom regarding good genjutsu. It also requires uncommonly fine chakra control, even among genjutsu. It is, on paper, not a very inspired creation.

In practice, she can already tell that this will be a quick, mean, dirty technique. It is strange and surprising, and it nearly guarantees a misstep, a short stumble, a breath of confusion. Often, in a fight, that's enough.

'It doesn't have a name yet,' he writes, 'but you can name it whatever you like when you learn to use it.'

Sakura licks her lips. She cannot think of anything she wants more right now. Not even a date with Sasuke-kun. 'How do I do it?' she writes.

And then, much later, she writes: 'Thank you.'

Between these two, she learns a lot. Her relentless questioning drags them into the early hours and her eyes feel gritty and her mouth tastes like something died in it.

Oddly, he is more pleased than bored.

'You learn quickly,' he tells her.

She knows he is biased - he must be, of course - but she believes him anyway.

The next days are given over to short, stupid missions, ineffectual team training and rigorous genjutsu practice. Sakura isn't quite proficient at her new technique before the exam - but she's close, close enough to test it in the field if she has to.

The chuunin exam comes faster than Sakura would ever have expected, and she hasn't precisely been optimistic about it in her expectations. She finds herself chewing her lip as she approaches the academy. Naruto is easy to pick from those waiting near the doors, bright and obnoxious among the crowds of drab colours. There are a great many genin Sakura doesn't recognise with forehead protectors bearing symbols she only half remembers. The big ones are obvious: Suna, as an ally of Konoha, is prominent, and she can also see Kumo and even a few Iwa ones. Ame is a smaller village, but close by and with minimal hostile relations, so she notices a few of them, too.

But there are many more she's at best only vaguely familiar with and there are at least three genin from some village represented by a music note, which she's never even heard of.

None of them looks very friendly.

"Sakura-chan!" Naruto crows and waves like he hasn't even noticed the other genin milling around.

"Hai, hai," she mumbles, looking left and right and trying not to feel cowed by their sharp stares.

If she can't even hold her head up here... she's hardly deserving of Sasuke-kun's attention, is she? And, says a quieter, harder voice buried in her mind, her soul mate didn't make her a brilliant new technique just so she can cower before a few mean-looking Iwa genin.

She straightens her spine but nonetheless edges Naruto through the door. At least the academy is familiar inside, and unlike these foreigners Sakura's got good reason to feel marginally safer inside its walls. She's unsurprised to find that Sasuke's already there.

There's a genjutsu on the floor indicator and a henge on the examiners, which are so easy to break Sakura almost expects them to be part of a bigger trap.

They're not, though, and for a moment she's baffled. What's the point?

"Whoa," says Naruto, like it's a revelation.

Sometimes Sakura wonders if Naruto was dropped on the head _an awful lot_ as a baby. It would explain a great many things about him, she thinks.

Sasuke, for some reason, decides to publicly declare that they saw right through the genjutsu. Sakura can't think of the reason for this, and isn't entirely sure they should let the other genin know about the illusion. But that probably just means she hasn't thought of it - Sasuke is, after all, a genius. She decides not to question it.

The tension is suddenly palpable among the genin present though, and Sakura is certain there will be a fight -

This is when Sakura meets Rock Lee. She loses track of her train of thought for quite some time.

At least until he hits on her.

"Uh," she says finally, staring at the shine of his bowl cut, at the gleam of his teeth and his strange bulging eyes and thick spiky eyelashes.

The vestiges of a kind, diplomatic person panic, escape from within and flee Sakura's body.

" _No_ ," she says, just as emphatically and harshly as she'd say it to Naruto - which is unfair, because of course Rock Lee is nowhere near as annoying or persistent as Naruto, even if he is sort of nightmarish to look at. He blinks, and a hurt look flickers across his face, and so she tries to soften the rejection. "You're very... unique," she hedges, and swiftly realises this isn't much better.

His teammate, a tall boy with dark hair, staring pale eyes and a haughty face, makes a derisive noise somewhere behind him, and it makes Sakura feel even worse. It's not Lee's fault he's ugly.

...She really doesn't want to encourage him, though.

"Sorry," she says, not very apologetically. She is aware of the many other genin around them, from all sorts of other villages, watching this whole interaction.

"Come on," says Sasuke. He rolls his eyes, and as a team they leave - and this, of course, is when Rock Lee proves himself just as persistent and annoying as Naruto, if slightly politer.

He cuts them off before they can reach the classroom they need to be in to take the exam just to challenge Sasuke. Sakura isn't sure if he really wants to fight Sasuke because he thinks he'll be a strong opponent, or if he does it because he's resentful of Sakura's attention. She knows it's arrogant to think it might be the latter, but Sakura does wonder.

The appearance of a large tortoise comes as a surprise.

Rock Lee's teacher is even weirder, with bigger eyebrows and more... uniqueness.

Immediately, Sakura thinks of writing to her soulmate about it. _Today I met living proof that my teacher isn't the worst teacher I could have gotten_ , she writes in her head. _The spandex was my first clue_.

She won't, of course. She's still aware that there's a lot of details she shouldn't be passing on, however hard it is to stop herself.

Despite how bizarre (and possibly scarring) the circumstances are, the strange interlude with Rock Lee and Maito Gai is the last bit of true levity they get for some time. After Sakura, Naruto and Sasuke finally make it to the examination room they find it brimful of unfriendly ninja.

They all turn to look at them, attuned to the creak of the hinges and the sound of purposeful footsteps.

Sakura stills. Her pulse thumps. She can taste the hostility in the room.

So this, she thinks, swallowing tightly, is what the exam will be like.

Something metal scrapes deeper in the room. She expects Naruto to lose his composure - what there ever is of it - in some spectacular, loud way, but she finds his eyes fixed on the Suna ninja they met a week ago.

If Sakura judges his line of sight correctly, he's looking at the floor next to the right foot of the smallest of them. Naruto's mouth is a grim line.

"Naruto?" she asks carefully. He could take this as encouragement to interact with her more, which is pretty much the last thing she wants, but -

Well. Maybe the heartfelt scene between Rock Lee and his mentor broke something in Naruto's brain. It's obvious _something's_ wrong. A quiet Naruto is never good news.

"Eh?" He looks up. He grins. He rubs his chest, right under his collarbone. "Sakura-chan?"

"...never mind." They don't really have the time or space to discuss anything here anyway. All these mean-eyed ninja are surely listening to them right now.

Sakura feels like she's in over her head already.

Kabuto is older than them by a few years, with strange pale hair and dark eyes and a smile that seems a little too kind for a ninja - or perhaps it's just that he's a Konoha nin, and so many of these others are unfriendly by contrast.

"You should probably keep your heads down," he advises, peering down at them through his glasses. Despite this obvious indicator that his vision isn't actually all that good, they seem sharp.

He also proves to be a surprising source of information, flipping expertly through flash cards to bring up whatever intel he has on the other genin.

"Gaara," says Naruto, before Sasuke can even interject. Sakura and Sasuke both glance at him, but neither says anything.

Kabuto's eyebrows drift up, but gamely he provides them with the information - that the Suna genin are strong is incontestable. "A B ranked mission as genin..." he muses, sounding impressed.

Sakura is less impressed, if only because her team ran an A ranked one and she knows that there's a lot of luck involved with a high level mission like that. She eyes the weirdest sibling, the one in the onesie with the hood that points up like ears. She's not sure what's on his back. Something heavy. A weapon, no doubt, but there's a lot of things ninja use as weapons. It could be anything.

"What do they say about us?" she asks instead, on a whim. She wants to know if Kabuto's cards list Sasuke's sharingan, or her increasing proficiency with low-level genjutsu.

Sasuke's eyes are on there - which is odd, because Sakura hasn't mentioned them to anyone. Neither, she's sure, has Naruto, who rarely makes any coherent comments about Sasuke when he even mentions him. And Sasuke is hardly a social butterfly himself.

She catches the glint of Kabuto's glasses and finds his dark eyes on her when she looks up.

"...Ah?" she says, blinking rapidly.

"There's not a lot of information available on your skills, Sakura-san," Kabuto says, with a tone like he's repeating himself.

 _Well_ , Sakura thinks, _that's because I don't really have many_. She is intensely conscious of all the eyes watching their exchange. That they're being extremely quiet isn't important - more than one of the ninja here is bound to be able to read lips. She can see somebody with cow-spotted clothes like Zabuza's shifting restlessly in her peripheral vision. Another Kiri nin?

Sakura bristles, because a part of her - a loud, angry part of her - finds Kabuto's implication offensive. Maybe it's true, but it's still offensive. And she's not sure it _is_ true, either.

"Maybe you're just not very good at gathering information," suggests Sasuke.

Sakura darts a look at him, surprised and bewildered, and it takes her a second to realise that he's not happy about seeing his bloodline limit on the flash cards there either.

"Aa?" Kabuto's glasses gleam under the bright overhead lights, and his mouth curves into a narrow smile even as he tilts his head down to disguise it. "Maybe," he agrees easily.

"There are plenty of other villages here," Sasuke says then. "Do you know anything about them?"

Sakura can almost see the attention of the crowd shift. Those nearby are still and tense, ostentatiously focusing on their own - oddly quiet - pursuits while they listen in.

Kabuto does, as it turns out, have some ideas about the other villages, but before he's done he manages to insult the genin from the music note village - Sound, as it turns out - and he ends up, sweating and staggering, then losing his breakfast all over the floor.

"Eww," says Naruto.

Sakura doesn't say anything, but she agrees. She decides she _doesn't_ want to fight those guys.

The written exam for the first test is easy. Sakura's not sure what she was worried about. She breezes through it without looking up from her paper. In the end it turns out that none of the exam questions actually matter anyway, which is a bit disappointing.

The forest...

The forest gives Sakura the same feeling as her mission to Wave. Their examiners are all full of intimidation tactics again - imagine a ninja needing to sign a waiver, honestly - and once they're inside it's huge and foreboding and dark.

Sakura can go five kilometers in under thirty minutes at a jog. Here, they've been given five days to get that far, just because they have a second scroll to get. It seems ominous. It seems like the set up for a free-for-all.

The forest doesn't sound like the ones all around Konoha. Here, Sakura can hear no birds.

The trees stretch up forever, branches huge and mossy and strewn with vines. She can hear the whine of a mosquito and, distantly, metal. High up, where the sunlight actually breaks through the canopy, she can see the tail of a snake where it's soaking up the light. It isn't a small snake.

Her heart is beating somewhere in her stomach, fluttery and too fast and useless to her. Sakura grinds her teeth and straightens her spine.

All right. They need a scroll, and they need to get to the tower in the centre of the forest.

They can do this.

Sasuke is as quiet as ever, and Naruto is just as loud. There's a short, sharp argument almost as soon as they enter the forest, because of course there is.

They come up with a password. Sakura has exactly zero hope that Naruto will remember it. She supposes anyone who actually recites the stupid thing will be by default an imposter. 

Naruto decides he needs to pee.

Sakura really has no desire to be present while Naruto's urinating, and doesn't particularly think she should _have_ to ask that Naruto take his gross self somewhere else to do it. It seems obvious. But then the Naruto who comes back is clearly not her team mate and she is already kicking herself for poor decisions. He could, she supposes, feeling queasy, have turned around.

This is when the exam begins to go go downhill.

There's a Kusa genin, then: a woman with huge, trembling chakra and a terrifying presence. Just looking at her makes Sakura's heart thunder so loudly she thinks everyone in the forest must hear it. It's a beat that won't leave her, unlike any fear she's ever felt. _Thump. Thump. Thump-thump._  She can taste it on her tongue, thick and tacky and --

Perversely she's almost annoyed that the strange ninja only has eyes for Sasuke. 

And then the moment is over. Sakura's blood's still rushing in her ears, but she's properly relieved not to be the object of that heavy, frightening regard. 

The Kusa nin's team is nowhere in sight and, more worrying still, she doesn't seem to need them at all. 

Sakura does not think she's a genin, or if she is it must be on some kind of technicality. There's too much ease in her, too much effortless grace and precision. It's more like watching Kakashi fight than a genin. From the frustrated wariness on Sasuke's face, he's thinking something similar.

Sakura thinks this is about as bad as the exam can possibly get. 

"Run, run," the ninja purrs at them, licking her lips. An enenormous snake rises before her, dwarfing them all in its colossal shadow.

The snake dives for them, and then Naruto is gone, Sasuke and Sakura are sprinting for their lives, and Sakura remembers the cardinal rule:

It can _always_ get worse. 

They run, sandals slamming against the old dry wood in the forest, without even the pretence at stealth. Sakura feels a vine snap against her face and leave a stinging welt. She can hear her heart, hear her breath whistling, hard and laboured. 

"Here," hisses Sasuke, and as one they drop into the lower forest, taking refuge in the dark. 

They slow and hide themselves, trying to slow their breathing and be quiet at the same time, even as adrenalin threatens to overwhelm their good sense and training. 

When nothing immediately leaps out to murder them, Sakura tips her head back and lets the trunk of the tree upon whose branch they crouch take the weight of her skull.

Too close. 

Just... too close. 

She looks at Sasuke. His scowl says he's annoyed, but his eyebrows look more like stress. She doesn't blame him. 

That Kusa genin is scary. 

There's silence. 

It takes Sakura a second to think about that. 

The insects were so loud before. It's silent... but it shouldn't be. 

Their tree gives with an almighty crack, splintering under the bulk of a massive serpent. Its fangs gleam in the murky half-light of the forest. It is so large its hiss sounds like a scream. 

The snake crashes through the forest, and it's all Sakura can do to keep out of the way of its falling body. 

Sasuke darts away more gracefully. The snake follows them both, teeth bared and eyes gleaming, and just when their backs are to another huge trunk, when they're cornered and panicking --

It stops. 

It... writhes. 

Sakura can feel the chakra rising in the air. It burns on her skin. 

The huge snake hunches. Its scales, once gleaming and smooth, crack and ooze. The beast's skin peels away slowly and horribly, and with a wet ripping sound Sakura could have gone her whole life without hearing.

From the wet fleshy mass beneath comes a shape, spine first, covered in mucous and blood and thicker things. It's the ninja - it's the same Kusa kunoichi, shedding pieces of her owm summon like water. She slinks free and then toward them. Her feet tap gently on the snakeskin, and then on the bark of the tree beneath it. 

She drips.

"You can't relax, Sasuke-kun."

Her voice is quiet, but it carries. The whole forest has gone silent around them.

Sakura's heart is in her throat. This is - worse than anything she's ever felt, a wash of killing intent like an avalanche. It steals her breath and numbs her mind. It's huge, it's overwhelming, it's going to kill her.

"You can't ever relax. Prey needs to strain their minds, ever ready to flee. In case of a _predator_." Her emphasis on the word leaves no ambiguity as to what kind of predator she means. 

The ninja licks her lips. Her tongue looks normal at first, fleshy and pink and sort of gross but _normal_ , and then it - keeps going. On and on, wet muscle and saliva, slick and gleaming. 

She takes another step forward and her body elongates grossly, jointless and fluid where Sakura knows she should hear the sharp crack of bones. Nothing moves like that - no beast or bird or leviathan from the deep. Is it a genjutsu? Is it -

Abruptly, the kunoichi flinches back. Her hair swings forward when she does, stringy and damp and inky black.

A series of shuriken thunk into the tree where she might have been, had she kept going.

"HEY."

All of them look up.

Sakura twitches. "Naruto!" She's relieved. Wary, but relieved. 

"Sorry Sasuke," says Naruto, crossing his arms. "I completely forgot our password."

Well, at least they know it's him.

He quickly turns to the Kusa nin. "Were you picking on the weak then? Now that Uzumaki Naruto-sama's here, that won't do! I'll _beat the crap out of you_."

...and as usual, no situation is improved by including Naruto.

He's going to get killed. Or worse, get all of the rest of them killed. 

Sakura can see Sasuke cringe. It's an eyebrow expression, a subtle one. His eyes go dark, sharingan burnt out. He licks his lips. Finally, hesitantly, he surrenders their scroll.

Sakura wishes she could disagree with him, but even if all three of them managed to fight successfully together, there's no way in hell they'll beat this person, whoever she is.

Sakura - Sakura _really_ doesn't think she's a genin.

She's also not sure the ninja's actually after their scroll, though, so -

Naruto leaps down, a blur of orange and a lot more energy than grace. He intercepts the scroll and punches Sasuke across the mouth with a _smack_ that echoes through the forest.

"I don't... I forgot the password, so I can't tell for sure. But you're a fake Sasuke, aren't you?"

Sakura swallows. Naruto is so _stupid_ , barging in like an idiot without knowing anything about the situation.

The ninja who has been attacking them is _right there_ and she doesn't know how long the woman will hold off. She lets them squabble for now, bemused by their infighting, but it has the air of a cat watching birds argue over scraps.

It looks like everyone's distracted right now, though, so -

 _Don't be helpless_. Don't be weak. Don't be useless--

Sakura can't afford it. Right now, her whole team can't afford it. 

She has exactly the kind of technique that might let them buy some time and run. Her soul mate made it up just for her, and if they make it out of this mess alive she'll tell him he saved her skin.  

Carefully, Sakura tugs on her chakra. 

She threads her chakra into the little things like her soul mate's been teaching her: into the low buzz of insects further into the forest, the mournful _aawk_ of a crow, the smell of decaying greenery. This level of chakra control is a lot harder than merely sticking to trees or walking on water, even though it uses up very little. It feels like trying to thread a needle with her teeth. She just needs to slip it into the kunoichi's chakra system, to curl it into the black spot around her cerebellum...

Her breathing steadies. Her eyes flutter. She needs to keep her wits about her, but she needs to concentrate on things she can't necessarily see.

"-diot and _coward_!" Naruto is yelling. Still yelling. He's so loud and Sakura wants to smack him. But maybe he's a good distraction. A distracted target is an easy target. 

At least the snake woman is still watching them, not Sakura.

Slowly, Sakura lets her genjutsu unravel, slow and steady, threads of chakra spreading like a spider's web, slipping under the kunoichi's skin. It's the most advanced illusion she's ever used. She doesn't want the kunoichi to notice too early. Not before she sinks her hooks in and settles it.

Sakura almost has it now, delicately woven in, ready to disrupt the balance, just enough to make her clumsy and confused.

It's easily broken, but that just means she has to be clever about how she triggers it.

As soon as Sakura lets her chakra settle, convinced she's got it right, the snake woman jerks back, dark hair swinging. Her expression flickers from amused to shocked, then dismayed, then --

Her eyes land on Sakura.

Sakura freezes.

Naruto and Sasuke are _still arguing_ , right there.

There's a frozen breathless moment when the woman's eyes are fixed on Sakura, when she feels like she can't breathe past the lethal intensity of that gaze.

"...Ah?" says the woman. "It's you, is it?" she murmurs in a low, insinuating voice.

The bottom drops out of Sakura's stomach.

Oh.

 _Oh_.

Oh _no_.

"Inconvenient," muses the woman, dark eyes contemplative. She clicks her tongue and unwinds from the tree, liquid and boneless and utterly nightmarish. Her long, long tongue runs out, over her teeth.

Sakura can feel the backlash against her chakra when the ninja - when _her soul mate_ \- sheds the genjutsu effortlessly. Of course she does, she invented it. It's far gentler than it has any right to be, a gentle shove where she should feel a slap, but then she moves and -

"Naruto! Sasuke-kun! Watch out!" Sakura's voice cracks on the last word. It's already too late.

She thought the ninja was fast earlier, but it's nothing to what it feels like now. She doesn't even see the first strike, but Naruto flies through the forest and smacks into a tree, breaking through it with the terrible sound of cracking wood. There is a pained yelp. It cuts off into silence. 

Sasuke flinches and his eyes bleed bright red. He steps back once, ready to dart away, but the ninja is already there. She is before him first, then behind him, shadowy and fluid, an indistinct serpentine horror in the darkest patches beneath the trees and she's _so fast_. Her face looms from the shadows in the bend of a tree and -

Her teeth sink right into Sasuke's neck. He screams.

Sakura screams with him. She is helpless again. She can't seem to avoid it. Her heart thunders in her skull but there's nothing -- she can't even think through it. It's happening too fast.

For a few long seconds he writhes in pain or some horrible internal struggle and then, abruptly, Sasuke drops.

All Sakura can hear is her own rapid, terrified breath.

"This wasn't precisely the use I had in mind for that technique," chides her soul mate, soft and conversational and in polite form.

It's just -- mundane. 

It's as though she doesn't even remember ripping herself from the innards of a giant snake.

It's like Sasuke's not writhing at her feet.

Sakura swallows. She's shaking. She can see her fingers trembling but she can't feel it. 

There's no way Sasuke can hear the words. He's too lost in his own struggle now, twisting and sweating on the broad mossy branch where they stand. His hand's clasped to his neck, fingers clawing into the skin. Beneath them is a mark - a seal, Sakura thinks, although she can't tell what kind.

For Sasuke, Sakura finds her voice. 

"What have you done to him?" she demands, dropping to her knees at his side.

"Hm? Oh. Just a... well, consider it a parting gift. And that kid..." the ninja ignores Sasuke, stepping over him like he's a rock in the way and not a human being twisting in pain. She peers over the edge of the branch. "That's..." her voice trails off. "Hm."

The woman just steps over the edge of the branch and drops, falling metres and metres without so much as a flinch. Her landing is light, almost silent, right below.

Sakura wants to follow, to make sure she doesn't hurt Naruto - any more than she has, anyway - but a low cry from Sasuke draws her attention. It's a seal, so that means it's not a poison, right? Can something be both? She thinks of the standard poison kit she has in her pouch but it's not even going to help. She can't remove it like she could an explosive seal, either, because it's not on his skin.

It's in his blood. The more he struggles, the faster his heart goes and it's... already it's...

Sakura balls her hands into fists.

She feels useless again. Nothing's going right. Why can't Sakura do _anything_ to help? Why can't she just -

There's a _thump_ behind her. Sakura flinches. Her heart leaps.

Her soul mate, whether because she doesn't care or out of some misplaced concern for Sakura's dignity, doesn't acknowledge it.

She sets Naruto's body down. He looks awful, still and silent and bruised around the edges, slumped over in the moss there beneath the shadows of the trees.

"He'll recover," she says, following Sakura's line of sight. She taps Naruto with the side of her foot. His arm rolls bonelessly, no tension. Sakura has no reason to believe anything she says, not really, but it's a better assurance than nothing.

Sakura looks at her team mates, strewn around her on the branch like discarded chew toys. Her soul mate tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear and just like that, there's no indication that they even put up a fight. 

"Who are you?" Sakura asks. She hasn't asked for too long. She regrets it now. 

Perversely, her soul mate smiles. It is a narrow gleam of teeth against her painted mouth, one that invites a watcher to share the joke. Sakura's stomach is sour. She doesn't feel like anything will be funny ever again.

"My name's Orochimaru."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. Most of you guessed it, but the point is: Sakura sure didn't guess it. 
> 
> 2\. If you check the databooks, Orochimaru has one of the highest genjutsu scores of anyone. It's as high as Itachi's. "Passing familiarity", p l s. 
> 
> 3\. If there was something you liked, let me know in a comment. Otherwise have a good night.


End file.
